Valentines Texts, Sexting, and surveys - SMS romance

Valentines Day this past weekend had a lot of folks talking about how to have a budget-conscious holiday, etc. There was also a lot of talk about text messaging as the new Valentines message medium of choice.

At&t published a [somewhat confusing] survey showing that 36% of  respondents intended to send text message Valentines day messages this year in the US, 67 percent of those folks planned to also give/send a real Valentines card as well.  It seems that At&t has a whole set of marketing messages related to texting, including their own “textpert” who can be seen on this non-embeddable video here talking about texting dos and don’ts.

(image source: http://xkcd.com/)

This discussion continues a general theme lately about folks noticing SMS as a tool for romantic chatting of one sort or another. We wrote about it back in May and posted a funny animated clip about it.

Katie Couric reported back in November that over 68% of Americans have sent love notes via text. (looks like this was also based on an At&t survey). Some call it flirting but others call it “sexting”when they think it crosses the line.

From Switched.com:

Researchers from Teenage Research Unlimited have finally put some hard numbers to the anecdotes about teens getting themselves in trouble with revealing photos.

According to the study, commissioned by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com, 22-percent of teenage girls and 18-percent of boys have taken nude or semi-nude photos of themselves and sent them to someone or posted them online. And a third of young adults (20-26 years old) have done the same.

Young adults and teens view sending these photos and suggestive text messages as simple digital flirting. 39-percent of teens and 59-precent of those young adults say they’ve sent naughty texts a means of flirting.

Another Valentines day survey was commissioned by Virgin Mobile in Canada.Via Textually:

A survey of Canadian cell phone users found 56 percent of them would rather hold their cell phone than a special person on Valentine’s Day. Guess who ordered the survey? Virgin Mobile. So much for credibility. But the title was catchy from UPI.

Last week, Angus Reid Strategies polled 1,000 mobile phone users over the age of 18 across Canada and asked about their attitudes towards the devices and special people in their lives in advance of Feb. 14.The Virgin Mobile survey found 52 percent saying their phone is with them all day, every day, and if push came to shove, almost 40 percent would rather spend a week without their special partner than be without the phone for a week.

The deepest attachment to phones versus people was found among the 18-34 age bracket, the release said.

So what can we conclude?

1. Carriers like text messaging, seems that it makes them a bit of money.

2. People like using texting to communicate romantically.

3. Journalists like surveys, even confusing ones with questionable goals/sponsors/results.

Did I miss anything?