To text or not to text?

Posted by Rahna on March 3, 2008 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

In a seminar that I was giving last week,we were talking about communicating with your target audience via all media available–including digital media.  We got to talking about text messaging and the rise in text message advertising opportunities.  There was a gentleman in his late 40’s who had sent a text message to one of his college buddies. This college buddy commented that he should not have texted him because it was costing him money.  He was grumbling over the text message, saying, “Only my daughter texts me.”   The gentleman in the seminar said that interchange made him skeptical about texting as a way to communicate with a target. 

My response was that he needed to make sure that he communicated to his target audience in a way that his target audience wanted to be communicated to. If he were approaching someone in their early 20’s, undoubtedly they would have a cell phone package that included unlimited texting and therefore receiving a text message would not have been an issue. The phone is where so many of today’s youth spend their time, talking and texting to each other (in many cases, texting more often than talking). Texting is by far the number one non-voice activity used with a cell phone. But if you are speaking with someone in his late 40’s, texting is not intuitive and not their preferred mode of communication.  In that case, then yes – sending a text message may not be the right thing to do.  

So should you start sending a text message? Well, it depends on who you are sending it to.