Chris Stevens said at September 19th, 2007 at 2:30am

It’s a rare event to hear stations in the USA using text messages, let alone effectively. I’m in Arbitron market #5, and I can’t think of any station here that regularly uses text messaging.

It’s crazy - it’s a missed opportunity to extremes. I won’t waffle on for ages, except to say that it’s catch-up time for the US.

Olly Benson said at September 19th, 2007 at 10:31am

In all fairness to our American-cousins, the mobile market in the US is different to Europe.

I’m no expert (but when has that ever stopped you before, Benson?) but AFAIR, mobiles for non-business use is a much more recent development in the States than Europe. Because of the availability of free local landline calls; US teenagers traditionally used pagers to “hit” friends, who would then call them back on landlines (”Hit Me Baby One More Time”).

And AFAIR there was never a requirement for SMS services on US networks; instead mobile-email is more common. The reason that Europe leads on SMS is not because our mobile phone companies were cleverer than the rest; it is primarily due to an EU ruling on accessibility. The mobile phone companies wanted to challenge it in the courts until they started seeing that SMS was popular with consumers. (I remember buying my first mobile and the bloke in the shop dismissively saying “yer, it has some text facility, but why they hell would you want to write a message when you can call them?”)

So the US radio market maybe slow to catch up because of the US mobile market; not that they didn’t notice it for seven years. I know Dan O’Day regularly acknowledges that Europe leads on SMS interactivity. What does grate is the end of the article where it says “we don’t know where we’ll be in five years time”. Looking across the pond will give you a clue…

Last time I was in the States (2003), I tried explaining Shazam to my cousin’s friends. They didn’t believe such a service could exist. A couple of years from now they’ll probably get it! :-)

James Cridland said at September 20th, 2007 at 12:09am

“In all fairness to our American-cousins” - where’s the fun in that? ;)

Colin Kelly said at September 24th, 2007 at 9:46pm

I’ll be interested to see what happens now the US stations have started using texts. Will they catch up and over take us in the UK?

Yes, we’ve been using text interactivity for much longer, but are we getting the most out of it? Lately some stations have pulled back (rightly in my personal opinion) from using SMS as a premium rate revenue generator…but does that mean we are simply using the technology to read out lists of mentions?

Stations like Planet Rock take it to a higher level and text the listener back with the time they’ll hear the song they’ve requested…but this is still rare.

Could we incorporate SMS with the station web-site so listeners can see all the messages displayed on a “wall”, and build more user generated content, rather than the presenter simply reading out the messages?

My worry is now the US are using text they’ll see greater potential than we did and take it further, leaving us behind, and making us look backward.