In a sign of how technology has changed the ways candidates can reach out to potential supporters, I just received an email from Barack Obama’s campaign about how they’ve started “Obama Mobile.” Basically, the email provided a link to a page on Obama’s website which allows people sign up for periodic updates thru text messages sent to your cell phone. As an added incentive to sign up to receive the text messages, you can also get an Obama bumper sticker.
Now sending text messages to supporters isn’t something terribly new and the bumper sticker for your car isn’t a HUGE incentive, but there is an added feature to this which I thought was a good move on Obama’s part. You can also sign up to have free ringtones or wallpapers sent to your phone. (You send a different text message into the campaign depending on which one you would like. In case your interested, for instance, the photo in this post is one of the wallpapers you can get.)
Okay, okay, so I’m sure a lot of you are thinking that text messages and ring tones aren’t that big of a deal. And in the larger scheme of things, you’d be correct. At the same time, however, I’m sure that the Obama team was well aware of the fact that younger voters do like to change around their ringtones and cell phone wallpapers when discussion of Obama Mobile was taking place. When you consider that a lot of analysts consider young voters the hardest group to get out to the polls, little steps like this and the formation of groups like Students for Barack Obama can really add up.
Filed under: Barack Obama
The word is incentive, not insentive. (And yes, there is a spell-checker in your write posts window
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I am a veteran copy editor and I am quite tired of comments about using spellcheck which overlook content! Maybe these sites ought to provide universal spellcheck so nitpickers can copyedit ad nauseum.
Thank you for your post on Obama’s use of text messaging. As the mother of a college student, I am well aware of how skewed all the polls are because so many young people do not own a land line. While everyone is aware of this, the fact that the polls continue to show HRC so significantly ahead of Senators Obama and Edwards clearly do not reflect the opinions of a sizeable portion of our society.
MSM would have us believe that young voters once again disappointed in the 2004 election; however, the republicans powerful efforts to supress the youth vote through insufficient voting machines on college campuses, caging lists, failure to include provisional ballots to say nothing of electronic manipulations of vote count and suppression of exit poll data, succeeded in creating the impression of an apathetic demographic.
Every attempt the Obama campaign makes to inform, engage and empower the youth in this campaign is vital! These people are so psyched by the emergence of this candidate, truly viewing him as their entrance into the role of inheritors of the torch.
Give them ringtones, wallpaper and some sophisticated polling devices they can utilize to own and run their own cell-phone based polling system.
[...] tip of the iceberg of a whole new era in voter contact and mobilization. My guess though is that a lot of the really [...]
I’m wondering who his team used to provide these services! I have to say i was intrigued enough to add myself to the Obama Mobile… the organization i work for is thinking of using these tools as well.. and Obama is really raking up the cool points for us youth! here’s to more real engagement in the coming months…
[...] 21st, 2007 by Bryan Scrafford Yesterday I wrote a post about how Barack Obama was reaching out to young voters thru programs such as “Obama Mobile” [...]