The key to a good mobile campaign is to offer the user something that they can only get through mobile. Whether that be a coupon or an exclusive alert, the user should feel like they gained something of value.

The reason I bring this up is because I received another text message from the Barack Obama campaign yesterday evening (in fact, it was 6:53pm ET, which is a little late in my mind, but I’ll save that discussion for another day).

Here’s the value that the message offered:

Barack will announce his
VP candidate choice
through txt msg between
now & the Conv. Tell
everyone to text VP to
62262 to be the first to
know! Please forward.

That seemed pretty cool and valuable to me. The Obama campaign is giving its opted-in users something that no one else will get, or at least it’s giving them something before everyone else will get it: information.

And on top of that, it seems that the opted-in users found out about this plan before everyone else, too. According to the Washington Times blog, the text message was sent to the opt-in list one hour before the email announcement went out.

Now I suppose that this isn’t that exciting to everyone, but the media has been speculating for weeks now whether Obama would announce his VP before or after the Olympics. And now that we’re one weekend into the Olympics (Go Phelps!), the anticipation of the VP announcement seems to have waned. So this text message is well timed. Among the Obama text messaging crowd, the anticipation is back.

Tags: marketing, mobile marketing, Obama, Olympics, opt-in, text messaging

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 9:24 am and is filed under In the News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.