Politics Meets Mobile Technology
The other two candidates using mobile technology, Clinton and Kucinich, have done less than Edwards and Obama, though Kucinich has encouraged supporters—in a popular YouTube video—to text "PEACE" to subscribe to his text messaging service. The Republican candidates haven't dabbled in cellphone technology yet; Democrats have generally been quicker to jump on technological innovations. However, that doesn't mean the GOP won't soon be involved. Tech-savvy conservative bloggers, who have already used their influence to persuade skeptical Republican presidential candidates to attend a CNN/YouTube debate in November, are also encouraging them to use mobile technology in new and innovative ways.
Patrick Ruffini, a Republican online strategist, wrote on his blog about how text messaging could have effectively been used at last weekend's Republican straw poll in Ames, Iowa. He said candidates could have told supporters to text message them and then reward those supporters with something if they stopped by the candidate's tent. All supporters would have had to do would be to show campaign workers their cellphones. Ruffini also said that using mobile technology is often better for local or statewide organizing—rather than just doling out national news about the campaign.
"It's something that people should take a look at," Ruffini told U.S. News. "It's not something that is a panacea by any means, but if you can apply it to the right situation—like the Ames straw poll, like the caucuses—you can make a real difference with it."
The technology has its limitations, and sometimes using other media is more practical. Ben Rigby led an innovative, yet not so successful, text messaging campaign to register voters in 2006. Rigby's organization Mobile Voter attempted to create a text messaging service that would allow eligible citizens to text in their voter information and then the organization would partially fill out a registration and send it back to the user via snail mail for the person to complete. Mobile Voter would remind the person to finish the registration and also to vote. Rigby said it was a lot easier to just set up a website and register voters from there, since the information needed to register is more complex than text messaging can easily handle.
Rigby said mobile technology is often most useful when organizing at a local level. The Edwards campaign is beginning to do this, by sending off text messages exclusively to people living in an area where Edwards is scheduled to appear or messaging people based on issues they say are important.
This is the kind of messaging that Oberman also advocates, as this is the best way to mobilize supporters quickly, since the messages go directly to a personal device. "The mobile phone, when it comes to politics, is not a persuasion tool, it is a mobilizer of the already persuaded," he said.
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