SMS text messaging has been proven to be one of the fastest & most effective ways in reaching out to target recipients. It is an exciting new medium with approximately 9.9 million mobile phone users in Malaysia as of the 1st half of 2003. According to the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, of this number of mobile phone users, about 1.4 billion SMS messages have been sent. This tells the potential reach of the SMS medium and the significance of SMS for everyone.

SMS messaging is a new and additional channel for companies in almost any form of businesses. It can be used for communicating with employees, providing value added services to customers, generate commercial transactions, and of course the opportunity to generate revenue via what we call premium SMS activities. The limitation to the usage of SMS for businesses is mainly the human imagination. SMS was initially used mostly by the teens and young adults for person-to-person messaging. It was then adopted by the brave and bold early implementers as a form of just disseminating or pushing corporate, product or promotional information to a base of contacts. Now, instead of just pushing information, more businesses see it as a means to target and compile larger databases of target customers by running what we frequently come across nowadays; the SMS campaigns such as SMS contests, SMS quizzes, etc, which boasts higher response rate and branding of the business. More and more SMS applications are also integrated into existing corporate IT environments. It will not come as a surprise that SMS could be something of a necessity for every business as a communication channel just as voice, email or fax is.

The major driver to adopting SMS is basically its unique nature of being: