“Pull Out Your Phones, Please.”
I just got back from the Vice President Biden rally in downtown Minneapolis. There were the ample cheers, community praises and campaign promises that you’d expect at these types of events. The shift happened when Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak asked the crowd:
“Pull out your phones please. Let me see them in the air. Now text MN to 62262 so that we can let you know what’s happening.”
This is the first time that I heard anyone make this type of call-to-action in this election cycle (besides our clients). In 2008, the Obama campaign used SMS to great extent. The campaign first flashed an opt-in message during their Super Bowl ad in 2008, and added nearly 750,000 to their list within minutes. Through Election Day 2012, it was hard to miss that opt in message: Text HOPE to 62262.
And in 2012: nothing. To sign up for Obama’s was SMS list, you need to go to their homepage, scroll down to the bottom and click on SMS. That’s certainly not the best approach for building your SMS list.
Romney’s campaign isn’t doing much better. I had to do a few Google searches to discover that the campaign buried its opt-in message to the bottom of its privacy statement page: http://www.mittromney.com/privacy.
With the advent of other mobile tools, such as apps, both presidential campaigns have pushed SMS to the back seat. While other tools might be flashy, there simply is no more effective mobile tool at engaging and empowering supporters than SMS, especially when reaching communities of color and younger voters.
It’s in the best interest of both campaigns to reconsider their SMS use.
(Photo Credit: Jerry Holt, Star Tribune)
Has Romney Updated a 2008 Obama Tactic?
If there’s one thing in the presidential campaign that can grab attention, it’s a running mate announcement. Four years ago, Obama sent nearly 3,000,000 people this text message at approximately 3:09AM EST:
Barack has chosen Senator Joe Biden to be our VP nominee. Watch the first Obama-Biden rally live at 3 PM Eastern time on www.BarackObama.com. Spread the word!
While there were a lot of finger-pointing for that early wake-up text and some in the media called it earlier, the campaign effectively used the carrot of the VP announcement to build up their SMS list.
Well, it seems someone in the Romney campaign paid attention. The campaign sent out this text message at 8:17AM EST this morning:
Who will be Mitt’s VP? Download the app and you’ll be the first to find out: http://mi.tt/QR50iY
While this message hit our West Coast SMS trackers at 5:17 AM (Mormons must not sleep in), we thought this is a great update, overall. Here are some takeaways:
- If your campaign is large enough to create an app, look for creative ways like this to drive downloads.
- But developing a single function app, like Mitt’s VP, is a bad idea. It’s a waste of resources and inertia–better to send them to the main campaign app.
- Less is more. Obama use 158 characters in his message. Romney use 96. While the messages have different intents, use words wisely to maximize impact.
- A personalized URL shortener, like http://mi.tt, is fantastic. Just make sure that it contains actual words and not an alphanumeric code. We typed in the wrong address and were bounced to a cute bit.ly error page. That kills word-of-mouth.
- And by all means, invite us to forward the text message. According to PEW, 10% of adults they surveyed said text messages to friends and family in the 2010 midterms. That’s a ton of people even on a statewide race.
What are your thoughts on this text?
