How SMS Helps In Everyday Life?
It has been said much about how effective SMS in business and marketing is. However, we’ve never discussed how the ability to print and send SMS may help people in other areas of their everyday lives. Well, it’s pretty high time now!
An Interesting Experiment
Doctors and scientists have invented a variety of vaccines that help the patients to get rid of the pain. Among them, there are anesthesia, painkillers, acupuncture and so on.
But there is a device that can remove the pain, and is not worse than other drugs. Guess what? It’s a mobile phone. Right, right. According to the recent medical research, electronic correspondence, namely writing and sending SMS, distracts the patients and significantly reduces the pain. And, what is even more interesting, correspondence with the strangers is the best pain killer, than messaging to friends, which once again proves that the meaning of texting is limitless for people in the variety of their everyday life struggles.
The experiments were conducted at the hospital in Montreal. Volunteer participants were those who were undergoing light surgery under local anesthesia. Patients were divided into 4 groups:
- members of the first group, who played a computer game;
- the second one — corresponded with close people;
- others — wrote reports to researchers, authors of the study;
- and the fourth one — did not use the phone at all.
And that’s what happened: those who did not get distracted by any mobile phone activities felt pain twice as much as those who played the computer game, four times stronger than those who wrote messages to their friends and relatives, and six times stronger than those who corresponded with the strangers (doctors and scientists in this case).
The authors of the experiment, Professor Jeff Hancock and Jamie Gillory of Cornell University in New York, having analyzed the texts of the reports, came to the conclusion that correspondence with the strangers is more distracting from pain, because strangers always try to write positive things, but while communicating with the friends, we are more likely to complain, thus not being distracted, but, on the contrary, paying attention to the painful sensations. And yet, with a phone in a hand (playing or writing), a person is better distracted from the pain than without a phone, which is obvious.
My research program at Cornell has focused on examining social interactions mediated by information and communication technology, with a particular emphasis on how people produce and understand language in these contexts. — Jeff Hancock
Now scientists are thinking how these studies can help patients in hospitals during the operations and other procedures. After all, such a pleasant anesthetic is less harmful than medicinal painkilling medications., which, however, may arise much other food for thought. Anyway, the truth is that SMS messaging helps in this way, rather than harms, leaves no doubt. Besides, this is the case when SMS helps with solving not merely the marketing problems. Needless to remind what SMS messaging means for any business marketing.
Text informing is exceptionally cheap in many parts of the world. Truth be told, in 2015, the cost of sending an SMS in Australia, for example, was estimated $0.00016. Surprising, eh? While the greater part of a phone charge ordinarily is its voice minutes or information use, instant messages are either incorporated into the voice plan or are included as an additional cost.
Notwithstanding, while SMS is entirely cheap in the great plan of things, it has its disadvantages, of course, but not as significant as to harm the users or their budgets, however.
SMS Multi Purpose
It may appear as though SMS is valuable for basic messaging forward and backward with a companion, with relatives, business partners and so on. You already know it often kills pain from the experiment too.
Yet there are a couple of other significant areas, apart from marketing too, where SMS is still extremely helpful, despite the huge amount of free apps on your phone to send videos, texts, images, and other files and make audio or video calls, even if you have zero services and are just using Wi-Fi or something.
- Cash Management
Once in a while, you can even utilize SMS messages to send cash to individuals. It’s like utilizing email with PayPal, yet recognizing the clients by their telephone numbers. One case is Square Cash.
- Security
SMS is likewise applied by several organizations for accepting two-factor authentication codes.
These are codes that are sent to the client’s telephone after asking to sign in to their client account (like on their bank site), to confirm that the clients are actually who they say they are.
Such service SMS contains an irregular code that the client needs to go into the login page with their secret key before they can sign on, providing double check of the identity.
So, as you see the use of SMS is almost limitless, depending on the area of life: from marketing to the medical services.
Variety of both small and bigger businesses got used to using SMS as well, as to promote their new items, inform of specials, offer deals and simply gather the information for the future marketing actions. Their success can be contributed to how easy SMS is to receive and read text messages. That is why mobile marketing industry was said to be worth around $100 billion as of 2014. Can you imagine the amount as of today?
See also:
The Role of SMS in Travel and Hospitality
Case Study: How SMS Notifications Make Parties
Before and After BSG: Mobile Messaging & Marketing in Poland
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