mPoliMinute

PoliMinute: 31 July 2012

July 31st, 2012

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?