Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Broadcast Your Message Over SMS - For Free

By now, you've probably heard that Obama's campaign team has decided to announce Obama's VP over SMS and E-mail:

Barack Obama is about to make one of the most important decisions of this campaign -- choosing a running mate.

You have helped build this movement from the bottom up, and Barack wants you to be the first to know his choice.

Sign up today to be the first to know:

http://my.barackobama.com/vp

You will receive an email the moment Barack makes his decision, or you can text VP to 62262 to receive a text message on your mobile phone.

I think broadcasting his decision over SMS is a clever move for a variety of reasons. It makes his base feel special because they'll be in the know as soon as the information is available, it reinforces his message of this being a grass roots campaign and geeks will again get the sense that the Obama campaign has this whole Internet thing figured out.

In fact, the Obama campaign has fairly extensive SMS options, which are outlined here (Want to follow Obama's comments on Iraq via your cell phone? No problem). I can't find any mention of SMS on McCain's site.

But here's the part that I found really impressive:

For high-volume text users (once every few days) Follow Barack's updates and schedule on Twitter, a text messaging social network. Simply text FOLLOW BARACKOBAMA to 40404

So, even with all the money available to the campaign, they are choosing to broadcast messages to their base using Twitter. The key behind this is that you can join twitter just by sending a simple text message. You never need to visit twitter.com. This is something simple enough, my Mom could do.

Consider this message I just added to the i2x website:

Want to keep up with Ideas2Executables news on your cell phone? Just send the text message: FOLLOW i2x to the phone number 40404

And just like that, you have a strategy for reaching out to your customer / fan base over SMS. Didn't cost you a dime.

I guess this falls into the category of: yet another reason to love twitter.

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