I saw this article today over at 160 Characters and I thought it was very relevant to this particular blog and so Mike Grenville, who wrote the piece, has given me permission to republish it here in its entirety:

“While today it may seem obvious that mobile phones are used to exchange text messages as well to talk to other people. As more and more ways of sending text messages become available on the handset, there is a growing temptation to merge message types. But are consumers really calling for convergence or is this driven by developments in technology?

We are often reminded that the rise of SMS was not predicted and certainly was not part of the original design. However it is not clear whether the factors behind the popularity have been understood and incorporated into developments going forward. Partly because of the way that new types of messaging have emerged they are often stored and accessed in quite different ways the mobile phone handset.

While the search for benefits from an IP network goes on, converging messaging has been touted as one of them. While there are benefits to converging the various types of message formats from a network perspective, great care needs to be taken before removing the ability of users to choose which format to use.

A Place For MMS
One of the reasons that MMS has failed so spectacularly was because it was touted as a replacement for SMS. The analysts lined up to say that SMS was about to peak and by the end of the year would level off and be replaced by the rapid rise of the shiny new world of MMS. This was repeated for a few years until it finally became apparent to all that MMS was never going to replace SMS and it joined the growing list of messaging choices available to consumers.

According to M:Metrics at the end of 2006 only about 2-3% of users send an MMS every day, with about 30% using it between one and three times a month.

Speaking at the 2007 Global Messaging Congress, Sibel Ozcan from Turkcell said that “the success of SMS so far is because it is reliable, it is easy to use and the pricing is simple - all of which is the opposite for MMS.” Turkcell have recently relaunched MMS and Ozcan said that they are growing both P2P and A2P MMS traffic. They have found that while an SMS might be sent to anyone in the address book, an MMS is mostly only sent to one person. Special event days and anniversaries was the number one driver for sending an MMS followed by as a decision aid while out shopping. Based on their research Turkcell ran a variety of targeted campaigns for example a series of ads on drink mats in coffee shops which successfully stimulated usage.

Reliability
Ovum’s John Delaney agreed that “SMS continues to have enormous growth even in supposedly saturated markets. It is simple, ubiquitous, most people know that they have it on their handset and it is reliable.”

This last point reliability, is something that MMS still has issues with. While reliability has no doubt substantially for most operators, at least two operators admitted at Global Messaging Congress that about 20% of their MMS messages were not delivered.

In South Africa Vodacom addressed the issue head on. Their research said that young people were not reached by traditional advertising - “give us a service that works and we will share it with our friends” they said. Messaging Product Manager for Vodacom Gabi Porter admitted that the operator got the initial launch of MMS wrong and said that Vodacom went back to basics. They made sure that handsets were properly provisioned to work with MMS and incentivised subscribers who could but hadn’t so far sent MMS. This strategy paid off and moved MMS from being the main reason for calls to the help desk to the lowest alongside a 15% increase in activity.

Porter emphasised that operators need to eat their own dog food! She said that Vodacom found that by sending an MMS instead of the usual SMS at contract renewal time, there was a 40% increase in renewals instead of just 15% with a text message.

MIM Enters Stage Left
Into this messaging comes Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM), which as CEO, Orange Group, Sanjiv Ahuja pointed out at 3GSM in February, “There are five times more SMS users than IM users.”

A recent white paper from Mobile IM provider Miyowa reported that on average, subscribers access MIM services 20 times a month, for about 20 minutes each session, Miyowa’s recommendation platform aims to progressively replace the monthly subscriptions the telcos charge their subscribers to access MIM, with a free service funded by advertising and recommendations for premium content.

Converged Networks
However as network infrastructure moves to a common transport patform, the temptation is there to merge message formats for the user, on the basis that users are only interested in sending a message and not how it gets there or what happens when it arrives.

Ricardo Ruggiero, CEO of Telecom Italia while recognising the “remarkable success of mobile text messaging” he sees IM as “an important transition towards IP-based services, which Telecom Italia believes are an integral part of fixed-mobile convergence.”

While Ruggiero said that “Telecom Italia is driving the evolution of messaging services and developing a high quality, integrated offer for customers”, it wasn’t yet clear whether this would be an integration that real users would be able to make sense of. Message integration is sometimes presented as a revamped version of Unified Messaging which only a few people could make any sense of.

Just because the technology enables a feature does not mean that it offers a benefit to users. Most users are well aware that the levels of intimacy and interuption vary with each message format and choose accordingly, even ignoring the price implications of different formats.

Carlos Fernandez Casares, Messaging Product Marketing Manager at Telefonica Moviles is on the right track when he said that “people will use mobile IM for a closed user group. But will use SMS and MMS for further away people - those we don’t communicate with every day”.

Pick And Choose
Operators need to be clear about how and why users pick different messaging types to suit a variety of purposes. For example, a recent survey by 160Characters found wide variation in the time they expected a response and how they used this as part of deciding which message format to use.

With person-to-person SMS generating US$56 billion in 2006 alone and with messaging revenue accounting for up to 80% of operators’ data revenues and around 20% of all revenues, the stakes are high for operators to get it right. Understanding users rather than the technology would be a good place to start.”
http://www.160characters.org