The Long and Short of Texting

In late May, some 2.5 million AT&T Wireless subscribers across the U.S. put down their remote controls, picked up their mobile phones and sent text messages to vote for the winner of the Fox television reality series “American Idol,” joining the millions who made traditional voice calls to declare their preference for either Ruben or Clay.

While the national obsession with the show is clearly a sign of the pending apocalypse, the surge in text votes is also a sign that short messaging service is finally beginning to capture the imagination of Americans, who have long lagged behind Europeans and Asians with text messaging. And with the rise of short codes, future SMS promotions appear even more promising — and lucrative.

Short codes are typically four-, five- or six-digit numbers assigned by carriers that enable mobile users to more easily recall and type text messages in response to specific promotions. For example, instead of typing the 10-digit numbers common to traditional person-to-person messaging, AT&T Wireless customers needed only to type “IDOLS01” to vote on “American Idol.”

“Short codes have been used in Europe for about three or four years,” said Steve Owen, solutions architect for wireless networks at messaging infrastructure provider LogicaCMG. “Operators use them for news channels, ring tones, downloads and so on — and they can charge premium rates.”

But while “American Idol” voting was restricted to AT&T customers, the future of SMS marketing lies in cross-carrier, universal short codes. For example, LogicaCMG and mobile marketer Mobliss recently teamed with AT&T Wireless, Cingular, Nextel, T-Mobile, Alltel and other carriers to implement a common short code, 7827 (STAR), that enabled customers to cast votes for the recent USA Networks show “Nashville Star” regardless of their carrier affiliation.

According to Owen, carrier interoperability is critical to the growth of interactive SMS — and the potential for revenue sharing is enormous. “We've seen a huge increase in text messaging in North America in the last year to 18 months,” Owen said. “And of the 2.5 million people who voted on ‘American Idol,’ a third of those users never sent an SMS before.”

Admittedly, interactive SMS isn't the end-all, be-all of wireless messaging. Certainly, if voting for glorified karaoke singers is the best Americans can do, then the industry is in much bigger trouble than anyone realizes. But according to David Bluhm, president of mobile data solutions provider Mforma Americas, that's beside the point.

“The 2.5 million people who voted for ‘American Idol’ is really not so impressive — it's not a huge number,” Bluhm said. “What's impressive is that it's teaching people to do things over their mobile phones.”