The Christmas season brought further confirmation that the number of SMS’s have declined in many markets as users switch at least some of their SMS activity over to social networks like Twitter and Facebook and also onto apps liken WhatsApp. This marks a hard blow to telecommunication companies. Nobody doubts that there is a decline in SMS use and the most advanced mobile countries are leading the way. According to a Forbes report, Finland’s Sonera Company saw a 22% text decline. China is also seeing a steady drop.

According to Coleago Consulting, Taiwan’s telecommunication sector suffered a sharp decline of 12% in SMS traffic as users switched to WhatsApp for messaging. Will this prove to be another dim situation for mobile operators? Not necessarily. “From an operator’s perspective the question is whether this is good or bad,” says Coleago Consulting. “In developed markets most operators sell large SMS bundles which often are not used up. The marginal revenue from SMS is likely to be near zero and therefore the reduction in SMS may not affect revenue materially.” Perhaps more importantly, companies should be readjusting their business models to merge the SMS cost into bundles.

Strand Consulting has also been adding up the numbers in the Danish market. Here too, all the signs of SMS decline are present across all the operators but one. Strand claims Danish SMS traffic decreased over 20% in the first six months of 2011 and the trend is continuing into 2012. Strand says, “three out of four (Danish) mobile operators have been experiencing a steady decrease in their SMS traffic month after month, and there is no indication that this trend will change in the coming months.” The fourth operator, 3, only increased its traffic because it was taking on new voice customers.

They continued to say that a mobile operator constantly faces the challenge to ensure that cash flow does not decrease at the same rate as their decrease in SMS traffic. The solution Danish operators have found is when selling smartphones to bundle data offerings together with SMS and MMS packages. So basically, instead of operators selling ordinary data packages, they are selling a package that contains a certain amount of data and usually unlimited SMS and MMS, every time a customer purchases a data package to use their mobile phones for e.g. Facebook, the customer is also purchasing a SMS and MMS package which is included in the price. There is also the implication that new third party messaging apps drive new value for the operator’s service, making users happy to pay for access. “WhatsApp is a much richer form of messaging and therefore of value to consumers,” pointed out Coleago. “This makes the mobile phone service more valuable to users and further drives smartphone adoption.”

So the trick for operators in 3G and 4G is to integrate ‘unlimited’ texting into the bundle (essentially turning the separate service into a feature) and incorporate the price as part of the data service.

On a local note, Malta’s outgoing SMS’s have increased over 2011. According to an annual survey conducted by the Malta Communications Authority, the number of SMS’s originating from local mobile networks and ending on fixed and mobile network operators has increased over 2011. Although some parts of the world seem to be using SMS’s less, Malta is using this form of communication more. In the first nine months of 2011 more than 426 million SMS’s were sent. Only a minimal decrease of 0.3% appeared in the first nine months of 2011 when compared with the first nine month of 2010.These market indicators show that Malta is not following the latest trends to the tee but rather applies what is most feasible.

Secrets to an interesting tweet

According to new research, a quarter of people aren’t paying attention to most Tweets being posted on Twitter. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology and Electronics and Computer Science University in Southampton carried out a study which examined whether people like or dislike the 200 million Tweets that are posted each day.

The research found that a quarter of these Tweets are rated as not worth reading. The lead author of the study, Paul Andre and colleagues Michael Bernstein and Kurt Luther, created the website ‘Who Gives a Tweet’ to collect user evaluations of Tweets. Andre argued that if what is worth reading is better understood, tools could be designed for the presentation and filtering of Twitter content. “It’s possible that users are willing to tolerate unwanted content. Some people may follow other out of social obligation. Other may dislike certain types of Tweets, but valued them in the aggregate as helping them keep track of people or issues” said Mr. Andre. To investigate those expectations, the researchers set up the website to encourage users to rate their like or dislike of other people’s Tweets.

In nineteen days from late 2010 to early 2011, almost 1,500 visitors rated 43,738 Tweets from 21,014 Twitter users they followed. The results showed that people like 36% of Tweets from people they followed compared with 25% which they didn’t like and 39% where undecided. In such a personalised system it’s surprising that so few Tweets were considered worth reading. An additional 39% responded that they neither like nor dislike the Tweets. According to Twitter more than 200 million Tweets are sent each day, yet most users get little feedback about the messaged they send besides occasional retweets by followers. “Social media technologies such as Twitter pose questions regarding privacy, etiquette and tensions between sharing and self-presentation, as well as content. Continued exploration of these areas is needed for us to improve the online experience” said Mr. Andre.

After ‘Who Gives a Tweet’ was launched, popular news sites like Mashable, TechCrunch, OneForty and CNN wrote about the site, and the link went viral. The following rise in traffic provided a significant number of users and ratings from many different parts of the Twitter network. The analysis was based on this data from the period of 30th December 2010 to 17th January 2011.

In the meantime, the researchers came up with nine steps for Twitter users to follow in order to improve their Tweets. Based on the research conducted these included:

Old news is no news: Avoid putting old news on Twitter;

Contribute to the story: Rather than re-Tweeting other stories, users are advised to add an opinion or highlight an interesting fact;

Keep it short: It will give others space to comment; Limit Twitter-specific syntax: While hash tags and mentions may be unique tools for Twitter, don’t overdo these symbols, as they make Tweets hard to read;

Keep it to yourself: Tweets with personal details were frequently disliked;

Provide context: researchers reported that Tweets simply linking to a blog or a picture, without any reason behind it, were described as “lame”;

Don’t whine: Negative Tweets were also disliked;

Be a tease: Don’t give everything away in a Tweet, it will entice people to click on the link, since they are not getting the full story;

For public figures: “People often follow you to read professional insights and can be put off by personal gossip or everyday details”;

“A well received Tweet is not all that common,” said researcher Michael Bernstein. “A significant amount of content is considered not worth reading, for a variety of reasons.”

For the full report, visit http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pandre/pubs/whogivesatweet-cscw2012.pdf

The Malta Independent ICT Feature

Even in this day and age, the ICT domain is still a male dominated arena. In today’s feature we will be exploring a new web portal that has been created by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to act as a platform from where girls and young women can learn more about a career in ICT and access to related training, scholarships and job opportunities. One of the most recent challenges in our lives is to keep up with social media. Each social platform has its own unique tools for people to keep themselves or their business updated. Facebook has its wall posts while Twitter has Tweets. But how many of those millions of Tweets are really worth reading? A new site ‘Who Gives A Tweet’ evaluates the quality of Tweets by asking users to rate Tweets. Today’s article will pose some steps to follow in order to post interesting Tweets.

On the topic of social media, a recent study has shown that people are beginning to opt to communicate more over social media sites instead of SMS. Also with new smartphone applications, SMS has seen a decline. However, Malta doesn’t seem to follow the trend as change in usage has been minimal.

Roderick Spiteri is Marketing and Communications Manager at MITA and editor of Malta Independent ICT feature

A career in ICT is for women too

A new web portal acting as a one-stop site for training, scholarship and job opportunities has been launch by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The main aim of the portal is to attract and encourage girls and young women to choose a career in technology.

The portal focuses on helping girls gain access to training and career information in the fast-growing information and communication technology (ICT) sector. It has been designed to help girls and young women between the ages of 11 and 25 to prepare themselves in pursuit of a career in technology. They will be able to browse information about scholarships, training and internships, ICT contests and awards, tech camps, online girls’ networks and other programmes that will give them that extra push to enter what has become a largely male-dominated sector.

Something which very few people know is that women were the original programmers of ENIAC, the American government’s first ever computer. Although teenage girls now use computers and the Internet at rates similar to boys, they are five times less likely to consider a technology-related career. This wasn’t always so. In the 1980’s, in the US, young women were earning 37% of computer science degrees; today, that number has fallen to below 20%. The lack of trained female professionals means that in OECD countries (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), just under 20% of ICT specialists are female. This also means that most developed countries are forecasting an alarming deficit in the number of skilled staff to occupy upcoming ICT jobs. The European Union calculates that in ten years time there will be 700,000 more ICT jobs than there are professionals to fill them.

With professionals in computer and information systems regularly ranking among the top 20 best paying jobs (equal to surgeons, orthodontists, airline pilots and lawyers), ITU is striving to attract more young women and girls into the ICT sector; encouraging them to widen their horizons and urging teachers and parents to ignore old fashioned negative attitudes. Experts claim that girls and young women are ‘turned off’ a career in technology because of a range of factors – from the ‘nerd’ image to deep-rooted ideas that technology careers are unfeminine, too challenging or just plain boring. “Research consistently shows that girls tend to choose careers where they feel they can ‘make a difference’ – healthcare, education, medicine. With this new portal, we’re trying to show them that there’s much more to ICT than writing computer codes,” said Dr. Hamadoun Touré, ITU Secretary General. He added that as society moves towards an ICT-based society, the increase in apps and telemedicine, remote learning systems and research and development, ICT has become a more exciting choice. He hopes that the new portal will act as a platform to attract many talented young women from worldwide countries. ITU’s new Girls in ICT portal will serve as a hub for tech jobs in markets across the world. The demand for technology professionals is increasing globally; in the US, there are now more ICT jobs that there were at the height of the dot-com boom. The latest development is the up and coming hybrid jobs that draw on multiple disciplines, such as bioengineering, power grid informatics, digital media and social and mobile apps. “There are many new interesting, fun, creative hybrid jobs that combine ICT with business in every imaginable field,” said Mr. Brahima Sanou, Director of ITU’s Telecommunication Development Bureau, which is responsible for the creation of this new portal. The portal seeks to create positive feedback from young women who take up technology related jobs, in turn creating inspiring role models for the next generation. Sanou maintains that girls contemplating career choices need tangible models they can aspire to. ITU hopes that the ICT portal with its profiles and videos of women participating in ICT will be a positive catalyst in generating excitement and rewarding new choices for women worldwide.

The Girls in ICT portal houses some 400 programmes, including over 100 scholarship programmes and an equal number of contests and awards, some 60 training and internship opportunities and over 100 online networks offering career support and mentoring. It also includes a link to a Girls in ICT toolkit, developed by ITU partner WITNET (the Global Network of Women ICT Decision Makers). Organisations wishing to add a programme to the portal simply need to log on and register.

Visit the Girls in ICT portal on: http://girlsinict.org