Text Message Your Message

My cell phone beeps a lot in the summer.  As soon as baseball season begins, my phone alerts me to the latest Mets score.  Every three innings during each game, I receive a simple text message. When the message says, "Atlanta Braves 0, New York Mets 5," I'm feeling pretty good. When it says, "New York Yankees 0, New York Mets 10," I'm feeling borderline ecstatic.

Just as text messages keep me informed of the score, the cell network can also be used to reach constituents for issue advocacy and election campaigns.

Greenpeace Argentina used text messages to recruit 4,500 people to contact their local officials to support an urban waste reduction plan.

In the United Kingdom, more than 50,000 people used text messages to sign up for the International Fund for Animal Welfare's campaign against Canadian seal hunting.

During the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, protest organizers relied on text messages to inform demonstrators of protest travel routes and streets blocked by the police.  Text messages also alerted legal aid attorneys about where and when their services were needed.

Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama offer text messages to supporters.  The Obama campaign goes a step further, offering issue specific text messages on health, education, Iraq, and jobs.  Supporters can also download ringtones and four different wallpapers to their cell phones.  (Obama text message page, Clinton text message page)

What do you need to start your own text messaging effort for a political or issue campaign?  You need to have access to a short code.  If you ever watched American Idol, you will recognize the short code as the five- or six-digit code you need to type into your cell phone to vote for the performer of your choice.

Getting your own unique short code can be expensive.  The alternative is to work with a vendor who will provide you with their short code.  The disadvantage of using a vendor's short code is that you will be sharing the short code with the vendor's other clients.  People responding to your campaign via text message will need to type a unique phrase in the first line of the message to distinguish it as a message for your campaign effort.

MobileActive.org is a good resource to learn more about text messaging and using cell phones for advocacy campaigns.  To download their papers, you will need to register with the site.  Another good source of information is MobileStorm.com, which has a very useful Mobile Marketing Tips page.  The mobile marketing grid is a great tool to reach thousands of users, but must be used appropriately.

Comments

[Wendy Bigham]

With buying e-mail lists being a big no-no for marketing, I hope text messaging will adhere to the same standards. I don't get nearly as many text messages as I do e-mails so marketing ones would really get on my nerves if I didn't ok it first.

Here's an example: I was at an Atlanta sporting event and fans were encouraged to text messages to the jumbotron so you can say fun things to your friends. A friend told me they were just going to use it for marketing purposes. I said, "no way, that's too sneaky." I was wrong (and very irritated) when the local electricity or gas company text messaged me about a bargain 30 minutes later.

[Julie]

Thanks for the info! We are considering integrating a text messaging component to our summer campaign & your post was quite helpful.

Do you have any recommendations for how to make the text component most effective?

[Julie, writer Surefirewealth.com]

It all depends on how creative we can get with the use of technology. SMS Texting might seem like a simple tool for communication but those who have important causes and advocacies know that this simple tool can do wonders with spreading important messages to the rest of the population.

[Katrin Verclas]

Thanks, Ernie, for the plug for MobileActive! This is definitely going to be the year for mobile marketing, and better yet, the year for SOCIAL mobile marketing and using mobile phones for social impact and making the world a better place. It's certainly my passion! Thanks again.

Best, Katrin
Mobileactive.org

[Political Text Messaging]

There's an interesting article about political text messaging on the Text Message Blog. Use the link above to find out what Hillary and Obama are doing. No surprise that the Republicans are way behind when it comes to text messaging.

[James O'Brien]

Besides a generational preference for different types of messaging, there is a major technical and legal hurdle throttling sms or text messaging from enjoying the same kind of adoption it has in many other cultures.
1. While US telcos battled cable to protect age-old monopolies, we missed a generation of switching technology which held both video and mobile back.
2. The wireless industry has yet to adopt national standards for compliance for advertisers wishing to use the strict, opt-in only networks. But each network currently enforces its own rules and campaigns are ended without explanation. Spam should be stopped at all costs on mobile, but as adoption increases so will the value of the text inbox. We will then see similar spam problems faced on mobile networks currently in other countries- much like the email spam we see here in the US.

The good news is that wise senders can profit from smart mobile campaigns, though many experts believe the US will actually skip SMS for the next big thing in messaging.