I was just reading an article on RCR Wireless about political text messages, Obama’s in particular. In it, author Colin Gibbs writes, “But in the course of a few weeks, Obama’s text-messaging effort has grown from a national curiosity to a bona fide new way to register volunteers, create stickiness with potential voters and keep supporters in the loop.” This got me to thinking.

In two weeks the election will be over. Someone, Obama or McCain, will emerge the victor. Afterward, there will be no more campaigning, no more debates, no more rallies or fund raisers. In short, there will be nothing more to receive a text message about.

But does it have to be that way?

What if, instead of receiving text messages from a presidential candidate, we received text messages from the President of the United States of America?

After all, just because the election will end doesn’t mean that everything else will. There will still be events of national importance that we should hear about. There will still be television broadcasts that we should watch. There will still be calls to volunteer and donate that we should answer.

So shouldn’t we get text messages about those things, too?

In the article Gibbs made a comment about Obama’s text message campaign that I think we should consider on a grander scale. He said, “The Obama messages made me feel engaged and informed, and gave me the opportunity to get involved with the campaign by contributing or showing up at a rally.”

Couldn’t that just as easily be “The president’s messages made me feel engaged and informed, and gave me the opportunity to get involved with my community/city/country”?

What if we all felt engaged by our president? What if we all became more informed about our nation and our government? What if we all felt like we were a part of a community, a part of something bigger than just ourselves?

On November 4th, after months of watching the debates and reading the articles and discussing the issues, we each will cast our vote. And then it will be over. Either John McCain or Barack Obama will be president. The confetti will be swept away and the yard signs will be pulled up and the patriotic fervor that pulsed through the small towns and the big cities of this great country will disappear for another four years.

But what if it didn’t?

And what if all it took to keep that spirit alive was a simple text message?

Just a thought.

Of course the best way to do this would be to

1. Go to a Doc in the Box and be diagnosed with near-death syndrome.
2. Visit a pharmacy and pick up my prescribed cocktail of antibiotics and cough syrup to be taken twice a day for four days.
3. Awake from my haze just in time to rent a giant duck suit from a costume shop so I can waddle my way to a Halloween party.

But no. That would be the easy way out. Instead I sat on the floor amongst fabric and foam watching someone who has even bigger problems: The Starter Wife.

If you don’t know, The Starter Wife is a television show enjoying its second season on USA. It’s about a woman who finds herself suddenly ex-wifed in the glamorous yet vicious world of the Hollywood elite. It airs on Friday nights, but luckily for me it reruns on Sundays. So while I’m surrounded by voluminous bolts of brown feathery fur and an incomprehensible sewing pattern, I get to watch the mayhem that ensues after Molly’s journal has been stolen and all of her frenemies’ secrets are leaked to a gossip website.

About fifteen minutes and seventeen stickpins into the show, I look up just in time to see “Text SOMETHING to SOME NUMBER” disappear from the corner of the screen. After I angrily yelled at the television, I began monologuing/ad-libbing from Air2Web’s Best Practices of Mobile Marketing:

If you’re going to promote a mobile campaign on television, leave the keyword and short code on the screen long enough for me to read/remember it. Grr. I mean, quack. Whatever.

Twenty minutes later though, USA promoted the keyword and short code again, offering a chance to win a pair of Tom Ford sunglasses.

(Also from the Best Practices: The more times/places you promote your mobile campaign, the better. And, boost participation with incentives such as coupons, rebates, or prizes.)

So as I dug through the pile of fabric, paper, and stickpins to find my trusty RAZR, I said to myself, “SUN to USATXT, SUN to USATXT, SUN to USATXT.” (USA has obviously read the Best Practices guide which says to not only to use short keywords but also to use a different keyword for each venue/event, hence SUN for Sunday’s show and probably FRI for Friday’s.)

After I dutifully texted USA, I received this response:

TSW: Thx! U have 1
sweeps entry. Std msg
chrgs aply. 4 rules go 2
starterwife.usanetwork.co
m. Enter again nxt wk! 1
entry/wk. Want more?
Rply WIFE Txt STOP 2end.

Of course I want more, I thought. I’m Miss Mobile! W-I-F-E.

(By the way, that response followed 4 guidelines from the BP: 1. Always state “standard rates apply” in the initial message. 2. Provide the legal rules for sweepstakes on a website. 3. Ask users if they’d like to opt-in for future messages. 4. Give instructions for opting out in the first message.)

In response to WIFE, I received this message:

TSW: Thanks! You’ll get 5+
msg/week including exclusive
msgs for Verizon users.
Std msg chrgs apply. Reply
with WET if ur on the East
Coast, WPT if not.

I replied with WET and assumed that I’ll be reminded to watch the show a few hours earlier than the folks on the west coast. Pretty cool, I thought as I finally began cutting out the pattern shapes.

As Molly’s hour-long saga wrapped up and was put on hold for another week, I realized that mine was just beginning. After six hours, I was sicker than ever and I still had a twenty piece fabric puzzle waiting to be stitched and stuffed into the likeness of a human-sized Mallard hen. But at least thanks to The Starter Wife, I might win a pair of fancy sunglasses to wear with it.

“Verizon Wireless said today that contrary to reports last week, it has not decided to increase per-message text fees for content aggregators from 1 cent per message to 3 cents.

“The prospect of an increase is just one proposal and Verizon could not act unilaterally to implement it, a company spokesman explained this morning.

“Initial reports last week cited a letter from Verizon to aggregators in which the wireless operator said the increase is effective Nov. 1.

“That was a misstatement, the nation’s second-largest wireless operator said today.”

According to the article on RCR Wireless, the carrier said that “the new fee was necessary to cover the carrier’s overhead in delivering MT messages.”

The fee will apply to standard and premium programs but not to free-to-end-user, mobile giving, or non-profit organizational programs.

That’s all, folks. For more information, check out the article.

According to Nielsen, “the average mobile subscriber in the US sent and received more SMS text messages than mobile telephone calls during Q2 2008.” And on top of that, this is apparently the second consecutive quarter in which this has happened.

According to the table below, mobile users in the 13-17 age range sent 1,742 texts but made only 231 calls this quarter. Kids under 12 sent 428 texts and made only 137 calls.  My age range, the 25-34 bracket, sent an unimpressive 331 texts and made 239 calls. I guess that sounds about right to me. I text a lot, but I talk a lot too.

Here’s the table. Enjoy. Read the article on eMarketer if you’d like some expert analysis.

I couldn’t care less that it’s football season, and that’s kind of scandalous if you know anything about me. I really should care about football—I’m from a football-crazed family. And I really should care about Alabama football—I went to UA as an undergrad and played a pretty big role in the team spirit department.

But the thing is, I was always more interested in watching the half-time show and never gave a rip about what came before or after it. And despite the fact that everyone who knows me knows that I don’t care, I still hear the question “What did you think of the game?” and I never know what to say.

What’s the point, you ask. The point is that I just signed up for ESPN’s sports alerts. Why? Because now I can find out who won without actually watching any football at all.

The ESPN alert program allows you to pick the sports, teams, and types of alerts you’d like to receive. After signing up as an ESPN.com member, you can go to http://proxy.espn.go.com/mobile/alerts/signup and sign up for team scores, breaking news alerts, NASCAR alerts, and even fantasy news for the sport of your choice. It even lets you set the time frame in which you’d like to receive the alerts, so you’ll never get an alert at 10pm, that is, unless you want it.

The program offers alerts for MLB, NFL, NBA, NCAA Football, and NCAA Basketball. This is pretty cool for me, and it’s probably pretty freaking awesome for someone who’s actually a sports fan. So if you are, check it out.

And now, a note to my family: please don’t disown me.

Now that’s probably because I’m not a national park kind of girl. But if I happened to find myself in one, you can bet your deer tail that I’ll want the ability to make a call in case there’s an emergency. But at the same time, I don’t want some tourist yapping their trap while I’m trying to commune with nature.

Apparently Yellowstone National Park has similar concerns. According to the Associated Press, it’s “attempting to balance competing demands for cell phone service and preserving the park’s tranquility.”

The park has developed a plan that would increase cell coverage while keeping the negative effects on the animals to a minimum. And the tower near Old Faithful would be moved to a less visible site at a nearby water treatment plant. (Read the article here.)

Seems like a good idea, Yellowstone. May I suggest disguising the towers as trees? That might help. Although the birds might get confused.

I just read an interesting article on RCR Wireless about the class-action antitrust lawsuit filed against the top four US carriers, which alleges that the carriers have “conspired to fix, raise, maintain or stabilize prices of text-messaging services.”

According to the article, the lawsuit questions the rise of the text messaging costs which doubled from 10 cents to 20 in just a few years.

But what I found most interesting was the article’s conclusion, which provided a juicy mobile statistic:

According to mid-year figures by industry association CTIA, 75 billion text messages are sent every month. Overall, CTIA said wireless operators generate $27.5 billion a year from wireless data, a big chunk of which is generated by text messages.

75 billion messages–that’s a lot texting. I think my sister is responsible for at least a 800 of those.

Sprint Nextel Corp. earlier this year became the first U.S. carrier to formally tie revenue shares to business practices, warning that partners who repeatedly violate Mobile Marketing Association guidelines—by incurring high refund rates, for instance, or not reporting billing errors to the carrier—can forfeit every dime and lose their short codes.

“Non-compliant short code campaigns will receive penalties up to and including program termination from Sprint Nextel Boost networks,” the carrier said in a confidential five-page memo. “Conversely, revenue-share incentives may be applied for programs performing will on policy compliance.”

Other U.S. carriers are quietly following in Sprint Nextel’s footsteps, according to Jay Emmett, general manager of the Amdocs subsidiary OpenMarket, which distributed Sprint Nextel’s memo and handles billing issues for the carrier. (rest of article here.)

1. Sending a text message to 2.9 million or so people at 3:24 AM ET is generally a bad thing. I’m a little strict about this, so I think sending a text after 7pm in most cases is pushing it (unless it’s a severe weather warning or a snow day announcement or about a dozen other reasonable things that I can’t think of at the moment). Therefore, in my mind, any time during the dark AM hours is off-limits. You risk waking up people in middle of the night (like this guy) and losing their trust, their business, and maybe even their vote.
2. Sending a text message containing information that the press leaked hours before is generally a bad thing, too. With mobile marketing, you should try to send timely, valuable information. Therefore, if everyone already knows the information you would like to present in 160 characters on their cell phone, then you also risk losing their trust, their business, and yes, maybe even their vote.

All that said, I don’t blame the Obama campaign for what happened. I really believe that they were caught off guard by the press leaking the Biden VP announcement and therefore found themselves between a rock and a hard place. Hey, if it had been me, if I were working with the Obama’s mobile campaign, I would have been running around like a headless chicken. I can just see myself now:

“HOLY CRAP. It’s after midnight. The biggest announcement that we were going to make pre-elections was just leaked by the press.  And we promised, PROMISED that the opted-in mobile users would be the first to know. What are we going to do? Do we send the message now, before many more people find out about Biden? No, we can’t do that, it’s too late at night. We’ll tick off everyone. But if we wait until morning the news will truly be old news and we will have broken our promise to our supporters and that will be just one more thing they can hold against us. Crap. I can’t make this decision. If I make the wrong choice, it will be my head. But there is no right choice. Crap! I’ll just let the boss make this decision. Then it won’t be on me.”

Now if you replace each one of those crap’s with a unique string of expletives, I imagine that’s about how the situation went. And perhaps this decision-making process was passed up the chain of command several times, each person thinking the same thing. If that was the case, you could easily kill two hours before coming to a decision.

I truly think that this explanation is more likely than someone in the Obama camp saying, “hey, I think it would be a cool idea to send this text at 3am. Who’s with me?”

I think keeping the bigger picture in mind is important. Sure, the Biden text could have been executed better, but look what they got out of it: 2.9 million (and probably more) opted-in supporters that the Obama camp can contact on election day, reminding them to vote. After all, it’s the vote that’s important. And I think this faux pas will be forgotten come November.

Plus, it feels like the Obama camp can easily make up for it with the work that it’s doing right now to help the Red Cross raise money to help the Gulf Coast get through Hurricane Gustav. Yesterday (Labor Day) the Obama campaign sent a text asking supporters to donate $5 to the Red Cross by texting GIVE to 24357. I just did it, and it was really easy. After texting you’ll receive a message asking you to confirm the charge (like all good premium messages should send). And after that you’ll receive a thank you message notifying you that the $5 donation will appear on your next phone bill. It’s a really easy way donate money. If you can spare a few bucks, I strongly urge you to do so.

Well, that’s it for me. Happy Tuesday, yall.

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