So when I read more and more of Tomi Ahonens book “Mobile As The 7Th Mass Media” I become more ‘aware’ of the segmentation of target-markets within the Mobile Phone adoption context; which after all – is accommodating the rise of SMS and MMS enabled services through simple applications that aggregate and disseminate ‘information’.
For starters, Tomi Ahonen asserts quite prolificly that “the cell phone is changing society” and that even “nine and ten-year old kids come home from school [and] report to their parents, using their personal cellphones”.
This is quite interesting given the various prophesizes and reasonable enquiries the author has purported on as I also am quite receptive of this adoption trajectory and use SMS most of the time for simple one to one or one to many broadcast of timely and relevant information which is appreciated.
In this context, I took some time out to garner resources on “insights” into the adoption of teenagers within the mobile phone usage spectrum and have found some interesting ‘front line’ data that mirrors Tomi Ahonen’s delineation of what we now appreciate as the “Connected Age”.
Firstly, lets look at the graph shown below:
As you can appreciate (in crystal clear black and white terms); mobile phone usage amongst teenagers has an interesting adoption frontier in light of all the recent changes to the mobile industry (e.g. the proliferation of unique SMS marketing campaigns and the rising acceptance of short messaging services and SMS aggregators working as a whole-in-one solution)
The real message in this picture is that despite the popularity of applications that are tailored to accommodate the delivery of timely information (such as RSS aggregators); Teenagers in the market in question have an interesting ‘infatuation’ with SMS text messaging that they often even go out of their way (during classes for example) to communicate relevant information to their various interest groups or friends.
As 54% of teens text daily and 33% of teens send more than 100 texts a day; mathematicians and econometric statisticians can most likely infer and subsequently interpolate a function on the importance of SMS messaging and how relevant and powerful it can be in this “connected age”.
However, such observations of statistical data should also be applied in the context of the “how” and “what” part of SMS texting is rising in popularity; whether it’s for general one to one communications or one to many broadcasts of epiphanies which are cultivated in a wider spectrum of knowledge and likewise disseminated to reflect the real nature of communications in the current age.
Therefore, in this light, its relevant to observe the graph below which clearly dictates that 63% of cell phones used by this niche market don’t really have any access to the internet at all! 
Wow – isn’t that a surprise? So how can we learn and apply the two issues at play here; the first being the inclination to use mobile phones more and more in everyday life and the second being rooted in the fact that the majority of cell-phones used in this market do not have internet connectivity (As most teenagers are not always equipped with a super smart-phone like the iPhone/Microsoft/Android variants that are still relatively expensive than phones from the archaic Nokia suite; which fulfil their purpose regardless of the internet access feature)
To really ‘understand’ this, we need to accept that its rather paradoxical that despite the proliferation of connected services; the archaic SMS medium is still quite heavily relied on as it is a) limited to a domain of character sets and b) universal in delivery through simple SMS gateways or routing through Telco networks.
Therefore, in light of another article which was written last year on “SMS Texting” and its rise in popularity over traditional “voice cellular data” ; it should be clear that the future of targeted SMS mobile marketing campaigns should observe data like that depicted in this post to co-create fruitful word of mouth strategies in alignment with tenets of the “experiential marketing” approach which is also detailed in this article.
Thus, in conclusion, organisations/communities/causes who are interested in utilising SMS marketing need to observe and entertain a ‘behavioural’ and ‘systematic’ framework in order to effectively co-create unique marketing ‘experiences’ which are primarily delivered through SMS text messaging to the market observed in question. This will require an insightful and reasonable framework together with a unified communications strategy that entertains the timely flow and natural tempo of information within SMS dominated “connected communities” to sustain the marketing efforts in the first place (As most SMS marketing techniques these days just bombard people without the appreciation of consumer behaviours and actions which are quite unreliably measured as far as I know it). This ties in with the natural availability and robustness of SMS gateways and aggregators that often operate as “virtual telcos” for the purpose of only delivering SMS through the most efficient and effective way to its target consumer!