Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

There’s a lot of talk about the use of SMS messaging as a communications tool recently. Textually.org has some interesting commentary on the matter. Here’s a good snippet:

“Instant communications technology has completely changed the role of word of mouth,” says Nancy Utley, chief operating officer for ‘Little Miss Sunshine‘

Movie studios once felt confident they had at least two weekends to sell as many movie tickets as possible before toxic buzz would undermine their multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns. Hollywood executives now say that the proliferation of movie-related e-mail, Internet blogs and text messaging has reduced that window to mere hours, as the quick decline of last weekend’s heavily promoted “Snakes on a Plane” proved”

It’s obvious that a message is able to be spread much more rapidly than ever before, but can organisations take advantage of this and harness that power. In some cases I believe it can, but we have some way to go before we’ve mastered its use as a communications tool. An example of this would be BA’s decision to send 20,000 SMS messages during the recent terror scare in the UK.

However I believe its power is overstated at times. For example, according to another Textually.org post the 2004 Spanish general election was determined by a chain SMS message in the wake of the terrorist bombings. I think the argument is extremely simplistic and can’t see how it led to the government’s downfall. In light of the upcoming Irish general election and some people’s assertion that mediums like blogs and SMS will influence the outcome, I believe that this serves as an example that these mediums typically magnify the underlying current of opinion that exists rather than forming it.

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