1.We merely need to look abroad for some good examples. The Vatican uses uber-brief media alerts to get breaking news to the Pontiff?s press corps. More from Wired here:
http://tinyurl.com/cjnh4

European countries leap frogged us in mobile phone use/applications years ago. But we've obviously caught up. Which is to say, you are right, but there are examples to lead us.

More can be found at the Mobile Marketing Association:
http://www.mmaglobal.com/

2.Hi Shel,

The use of SMS to update media is indeed a powerful tool especially if combined with RSS feeds. A tool like http://www.feedbeep.com does the job very well. It changes your RSS feed in an SMS message and people can easily subscribe. They also cover both Europe and the US, something other similar services do not.

As to the situations this could be used in: I have been writing about crisis communications via RSS+SMS several times (http://tinyurl.com/bgdzh) but one of the contexts I see is mobile workers. More and more employees are or will be working in a mobile set up where they do not know beforehand where they will work that day (depends on their agenda & priorities). Management will not be able to know where they are or if they are connected to the company network at the time of a crisis. But you can be sure they will have their mobile phone with them. Also, more advanced SMS broadcast services allow for SMS scenarios; "if you received this SMS then reply by pushing...", that way companies will be able to know immediately what the situation of their employees is. This is a critical part in a crisis and I know companies who were unable to reach their employees for about 5 hours... On the other hand, in case of a major crisis, mobile networks will go down because of traffic overload but still. Less dramatic situations can be imagined; alerting your employees on the road that your HQ is blocked because of a traffic accident/jam and asking them to deviate to a satellite office for instance. You can read more on this at http://tinyurl.com/d4lu7

One "critique" I read from time to time on SMS is that it is not so popular in the US as it is in Europe or Asia...

3.Philippe and Kevin, the reason SMS isn't as popular in the US as it is elsewhere is competing standards. Sprint uses one network, Verizon another -- it's often difficult to send a text message from one service to another. In the rest of the world, there is agreement on a common standard. (Standards can be a good thing, eh?) But the text messaging applications are increasingly workable across standards, so it's time for businesses in the US to explore more applications of SMS than have been practical in the past.

4.Shel:

Houston-based qtags (http://www.qtags.com and www.allaboutqtags.typepad.com) uses SMS as a way to help consumers "tag" or "remember" web addresses and other information while they are on the go (qtags is a client of mine).

For example, the surf gear company RipCurl uses qtags on its mobile advertising ... consumers who are interested in learning more can text a key word to qtags and receive an SMS in return with a web address for further info.

qtags is also gaining acceptance as a way for people at conferences to learn about one another and share contact information.

While qtags works across the various mobile phone carrier platforms, the issue here in the U.S. is still one of "texting acceptance" ... it's still primarily a young-person's tool. But that's changing.

5.Kevin and Philippe say it well. The use of SMS for advertising, PR, sales promotion, internal communication, etc., etc. is already widespread in Europe - and has been in the UK for at least 5 years. For once, we had a good industry standard (GSM) which helped many mobile marketing businesses and agencies bloom.

Many of those same businesses are now bringing their knowledge and experience to the US, so hopefully you won't need to wait too long, Shel.

6.I did some, what was then pioneering work presenting recruitment related material by SMS back in 2000 / 2001. I was very fortunate to be working for a media firm at the time who had a group looking at communications technology.

The biggest issue for the use of SMS as a marketing technology is that it is very intrusive. If you send an email you pretty much knew that a person would be sitting in front of a computer reading their email when they read it. Therefore they had 'allocated' their time to activity & didn't feel too intruded if your message was received.

With SMS you don't know what the reader is doing when they receive it. Depending on what they are doing depends on how your message is received. Therefore, if you want to take a relatively safe approach it is really only desirable for essential messages where the user will want to be disturbed at any time.

SMS applications that the user prompts (here we have one which sends the next time of a train with platform number) are OK because the user demands the message at that time.

7.You can see how many companies are using sms at http://www.usshortcodeswhois.com. Why don't more use it. The simple answer is cost. It costs the sender to send messages. I can tell you more about that if interested.

8.It seems that we PR bloggers spend a lot of time talking about the phenomenon of blogging...Suffice it to say that I think PR will survive, but talk is cheap.

Shel Holtz and several others, including these two from Amy Gahran about the limitations of blogs and another about using RSS to follow a conversation between blogs, makes me think that we need to start some wholesale blogstorming about applications.

Here are some of my ideas:

9.Following up on SMS and the fact that it is less widely used in the US... What about WAP enabled mobile phones/mobile phones with internet access ? Does this sound like the "standard" mobile phone in the US ?

Because if it is then PR pro's can short cut the SMS set up and create a mobile version of their blog/communications platform in question through a Winksite (http://winksite.com) - you can see the mobile blog version of my blog here: http://conversation.squarespace.com/moblog/ (this is exactly what you would see on your mobile phone)

Winksite allows for RSS subsciptions and much more but in short, this is a direct channel to internet enabled mobile phones.

Of course this means that people need to subscribe to the feed and have some alert go off when a "crisis update" (if we go with the scenario I described in my previous post) comes in.. On the other hand it gives back control to the end user - not to the one sending SMS messages.

A good start to read on possible applications in communications is found in this article on Winksite's blog called Politics To Go: http://winksite.com/site/help_bl_view.cfm?blog_id=5687

Hope this helps... Kind regards, Phil

10.In San Antonio, our local water system (SAWS) sends out weekly watering advice by e-mail, phone message or their call-in line. SMS would be an easy and natural extension and might even save time and money over automated phone messages. Make government cool.