Infographic: Momentim of Mobile

From Compuware.com:

Brand Images of Cable News

According to YouGov's BrandIndex, the perceived brand image of the major cable news networks has remained fairly constant in recent weeks, despite the small jump in viewing linked to the missing aircraft story..  The BrandIndex Buzz Index compares consumer perceptions of brands, and looks at the net difference between positive and negative comments.

As the graph shows, only Fox News has generated a net positive "Buzz", and seems to have more consistent values (in the +4 to +6 range) in 2014.  None of the other measured cable networks generated a positive Buzz value over the measured time frame.  CNN's perception score seems to have bottomed out last June (hitting -17), before making it back to a -4 score in October 2013, with consistent fluctuations after that.  Consumer perceptions of CNN Headline have largely tracked those of CNN.  Consumer perception of MSNBC has been very consistent since the start of 2014, with scores in the -9 to -10 range.  That suggests the audience has pretty much made up its mind about MSNBC, and the network hasn't been able to do much to shake that overall negative impression.  Since many of the big swings seem linked to major news events, it might also suggest that MSNBC's specific coverage of news doesn't change viewers perceptions about the network.

Source -  Despite disaster coverage CNN perception declines,  YouGov BrandIndex report

Social Media Week Infographic: Texting Apps

From the Wall Street Journal - Global preferences for iPhone messaging apps.

Teen Texting

Post contributed by Wesley Mills -

  A survey done by Princeton Review Research Associates International polled a representative sample of around 800 teenagers, ages 12-17. One of the main goals of these polls and interviews was to get a good gauge on what percentage of teens were texting and using their mobile devices the most.

  According to the Pew Research Center in 2011, 77% of teens had a cell phone and older teens are more likely to have a cell phone, and smartphone at that, than younger ones. Education is also an important factor as teenagers whose parents have high school diplomas are more likely to have cell phones than ones who don’t. Along with education brings income, and those parents make more than $75,000 allow their child to have a 91% chance of owning a cell phone as opposed to parents who make less than $30,000 who only have a 62% chance.

  Amongst cell phones, smartphones are majorly owned by older teens and the “data suggests a cell phone ownership evolution by age.” Since smartphones are social media friendly, it would only make sense that the majority of smartphone users would be teenagers and those that do have them are using them for purposes such as Twitter and Facebook.As the Pew Research Center report summarized,

“As with adults, smartphone-owning teens are avid users of a number of social media applications—91% of teen smartphone owners use social networking sites, and 25% are Twitter users compared with 77% of teens without smartphones who use social network sites and 13% who use Twitter.”

Source - Teens, Smartphones & Texting,  report by Pew Internet & American Life Project

The full study report is available here

Edit track -  Added graphic (BJB) 

SMS (Text Messaging) Evolves

Text messaging (SMS) has been a major success for cellular networks - last year more than 6.1 trillion messages sent, worldwide.  Locally, the U.S. took over as the king of text, with SMS subscribers sending an average of 660 messages a month.  And with the extremely low cost of sending SMS, texting has historically been a huge profit center.

Revenue growth from SMS has started to slow, however.  Analysts attribute this to several factors.  First, as texting became popular, people switched from per-unit pricing (typically 10 cents per text in the U.S.) to larger and larger bundling plans with lower per-unit costs. More recently, wireless carriers are dropping these bundles in favor of unlimited messaging plans.  Wireless carriers are seeing higher SMS use, but generating less revenue on a per-message basis.

Second, the rise of smartphones have opened a second channel for text services through the Internet.  A number of IP-based text services have emerged in the last few years, some tied to social media like Facebook and Twitter.  These run through a wireless provider's data plan, rather than through their SMS channels.  However, wireless providers are starting to phase out unlimited data plans, which could mean more revenues from IP-based texting, or a shift back to using SMS.  In addition, many of the IP-based texting systems require both users to have the same applications open at the same time, while SMS works on any cell phone and any service anywhere in the world - a valuable feature as yet unmatched by IP-based services.  Thus, most analysts don't see IP-based texting replacing SMS as much as carving out some niche uses.

Chetan Sharma (Chetan Sharm Consulting) predicts a larger shift -

"...within 5-10 years a good portion [of users] will have shifted to Internet messaging as opposed to traditional SMS messaging... (Still) messaging is in trillions so even if somebody has millions of messages [being sent via his app] going on a daily basis, it is still a tiny fraction [of the market],"

The ability to message has enough value to users that the concept of mobile messaging isn't likely to disappear anytime soon.  There may well be shifts from one form to another along the way, but as networks and services become more intelligent, its likely that the various forms of messaging will integrate into a universal messaging system;

The article (link below) also identifies and discusses a number of the alternatives to wireless carrier SMS and MMS (Multimedia Message Service) channels.  If you're interested, click through.

Source: "SMS: The dying cash cow for wireless carriers?" FierceMobileContent