techPresident - Text - Comments

American Idol meets American Candidate

Micah L. Sifry — Tue, 15 May 2007 20:56:12 -0400

David--

Very cool idea. What I like about it is there's nothing stopping them from trying this except their own imagination and whoever is doing handling their mobile SMS strategy. Speaking of which, do any of the Repubs have a mobile SMS strategy?

I'm sure the first person who does this will be sneered at...the same way the establishment sneered at Jerry Brown when he started mentioning his 1-800 number during the Democratic debates of 1991-92. Needless to say, he raised a huge amount of small (no >$100) donations that way and stayed in the race far longer than any other D...and by the end of that cycle everyone had an 800-number.

Micah

Well, you can vote

Nancy Scola — Tue, 15 May 2007 11:15:43 -0400

Just so as not to give anyone the wrong idea about the sorry state of democracy in DC, you can definitely vote for a nominee/President. It might not count for darn much of anything, but that's of course the case in a lot of U.S. states.

to txt or not to txt

justin@justinhamilton.org — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 08:04:04 -0500

Don't forget that that for the average consumer (read voter) txt-ing frequently can be quite expensive if you don't have some kind of plan; particularly for the young people who would be most likely to use sms in the first place. Unlike e-mail, you're asking people to pay money each time they hear from you. For some people this won't matter, but for many it will.

The GOP found that the best use of SMS was to keep in touch with their most solid supporters and mostly when used as an alert system for e-mails they sent out (i.e. "don't forget to check your email for an important message from candidate X"). In those cases SMS was used to drive up the open rates of the GOP's email program.

For the most part, candidates seem to think its enough that they've just heard of text messaging and that the wow factor they think that generates should be enough.

I think its real value (yet to be unlocked) is in field organizing and GOTV.

So ideally a candidate would build in interactivity to enhance dialog, not by rapid response, but by asking survey questions that draw on the crowd to help plot campaign strategy ala howard dean.

Once you build that trust relationship, and have buy-in, and loyal, regular users, you can branch out to informing people of "meet up" like events, candidate appearances, and ultimately, building a viral, peer to peer GOTV operation.

As far as rapid response, I think the Philippines holds the answer: offer a ring tone that is a voice recording set to music. this can be funny or serious, but must be interesting enough for me to decide that everyone I know should hear it.