Are company texts different to personal texts?

By Laura Bradley

 

Text messaging is the act of sending a short, electronic message between two or more mobile phones. The sender of a text is known as the texter and the service itself has different colloquialisms depending on the country. SMS messaging was used for the first time in 1992 by Neil Papworth who used a computer to send a message "Merry Christmas" through the Vodafone network to the phone of Richard Jarvis. Radiolinja was the first network to offer a person to person text messaging service in 1994. The growth of text messaging was slow to start with, but today it is the most used mobile service, with 74% of all mobile users using the Short Message Service.

 

Text messaging is usually used between personal mobile users, as a replacement for phone calls. As text messaging has become so popular, it is now also used by advertising agencies and advertisers. Since the 2000s, the use of text messaging in businesses has grown dramatically; this is because companies look for competitive advantages, so turn to new technology such as texting. Businesses use text messaging for updates, reminders, campaigns, and to display content. SMS can also be used for consumer/customer to business communications, such as giving information or for competitions. When looking at the texts I have received from Orange over the past few weeks many of the texts are in declarative form, for example "You've got free access...", "You've just topped up by..." and "You've only got..."  Many of the texts are about portraying information to the customer about their phone network and what is on offer for the customer to receive. An advantage of businesses using texting is that the message is received almost immediately after it is sent, so the information given is up to date and the message can be read/responded to at the receiver's convenience.

 

Many texts that are passed for personal reasons are for chatting purposes. Some studies have explored the communicative functions on texting. One study by Grinter and Eldrige (2001 – 2003), studied this. They found that there are four types of text message conversations and what percentage of their sample used the types. The four types are communication co-ordinations (24%), planning activities (25%), chatting (39%) and other (12%). When comparing my personal texts with the texts I have received from Orange, one thing I noticed was that the personal texts tended to miss out closed class words, such as "a", "I" and "the", so therefore making the texts informal. However, Orange texts did not miss out any words, so therefore giving it a more formal feel. Something else I noticed was that the personal texts tended to use emoticons, for example ":)", ":O" and ":(",  by including the emoticons it creates a personal feel to the text, whereas the Orange texts seemed to not use them at all, giving a distant feel.  

 

References:

Milward Brown, 2012-01-03, When do emoticons have a place in the business world? http://www.milwardbrown.com/global/blog/Post/2012-01-03/When-do-emoticons-have-a-place-in-the-business-world.aspx

 

Wikipedia, 18 June 2012, Text messaging. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text messaging#In business

 

Mark Michuda, 2013, How to use Text Messaging to Reach Customers. http://www.startupnation.com/business-articles/9139/1/text-messaging-reach-customers.htm

 

Caroline Tagg, March 2009, A corpus linguistics of SMS text messaging. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/253/1/Tagg09PhD.pdf