Obama's Text

No, not what he said.

I'm talking about the persistent push of text messaging by the campaign in Mile High Stadium. I don't know if it was apparent to TV viewers, but the campaign sought text messages from attendees in stadium multiple times. The posted quiz questions (text your answers to 62262 -- "OBAMA") on Obama policy positions. They asked people to text why they were supporting Obama and then streamed some of the responses on the large screens. They showed a map of the US displaying where they had the most text messages from and challenged the crowd to text where they were from to make their area stand out.

In one evening, they got 30,000 text messages. That means 30,000 cell phone numbers.

This was not a stunt and here's why it's important to the Obama campaign and its relevance to public affairs:

Part of Obama's strategy is to bring new, younger voters to the polls. How do these voters communicate? By text messaging. I met with a PR consultant I know while here and she related that when she was working with recent college graduates who were surrogates for a client, they only way she could effectively communicate with them was by text message. It's how they communicate. And so the Obama campaign is picking the right technology to reach a critical audience.

We don't have packed speeches in football stadiums in our arsenal to generate text messages, but if the young audience (and if Obama is successful, it will be a more politically aware younger audience) is important to you then text messaging needs to be in your toolbox.