You’ve seen the commercial for the Blackberry Torch, where the boss is barking orders at his phone-distracted employees, telling each one what he or she can do on their phones. But did you notice that no one is ordered to talk on the phone?
And the Pew Internet and American Life Study recently released a report called “Americans and Their Cell Phones” in which they detail the many ways Americans use their phones – except for talking on them, which isn’t even mentioned in the report. They do mention, though, how people pretend to use them (though they don’t say they pretend to talk on them) to avoid actually talking to someone in person.
“Text messaging and picture taking continue to top the list of ways that Americans use their mobile phones—three quarters of all cell owners (73%) use their phones for each of these purposes. Other relatively common activities include sending photos or videos to others (54% of cell owners do this) as well as accessing the internet (44%)…13% of cell owners pretended to be using their phone in order to avoid interacting with the people around them.”
Between 34 and 38 percent use their phone to send and receive emails – an important statistic when designing a marketing campaign based on emails. Roughly one-third of your messages will be opened on a hand-held device, so it’s important to keep emails short, graphic free, and to the point. Embed a link so they can go get more info if they’re interested (which is on your website, of course), for those who are reading it on their desktop, or a video link for those on smartphones.
