Mobile Messaging Madness

A new report from Aberdeen says the best companies use varied means of mobile messaging to stay in touch with their employees and their customers. Do you?I am a voracious sender of text messages. I think the most I ever sent and received in one month was a hair over 1200. Yes, 1200 text messages. That's 40 per day. I find that my SMS rate goes up dramatically during trade shows, when I need to coordinate meeting times and locations and social plans with many more people in a short time than I normally do. And ever since I've become a BlackBerry user, I just see one in-box and often use emails interchangeably with SMS and PIN messages when I know my recipient has a BlackBerry as well. The funny thing is, none of this was ever sanctioned by my employers.

It should have been.

Informal and nettlesome it may be, but mobile messaging is not just for teenagers any more. When phone calls just aren't going to work, SMS's can. When it's vitally important to send a picture of a burst water line to some engineers, an MMS (picture message for you non geeks) can get the point across faster than using a digital camera and laptop. While records of these types of messages are often kept by the cellular carrier, they are probably not added to your company's filing of all communications, as financial firms are require do to by law.

What about the company that uses instant messaging (IM) in the office? While enterprise-level IM programs exist, I find most people still use Yahoo Instant Messenger or AIM, which are not nearly as secure. Applications also allow you to load your IM client on your phone, so you have "presence" even when out of the office and can use IM like SMS.

The top-performing organizations in the world know this, and they're on it. They are exploring all the options of being able to send the right message at the right time--and to keep track of what those messages are. These top IT organizations have seen the light at the end of the tunnel, where there's only one in-box for all messages to flood to.

For all you SMBs floating around out there, it's time to get on the train and make sure your employees aren't misusing their IM, MMS and SMS capabilities to send the wrong messages to the wrong people at the wrong time.