Obama's New Mobile Platform is More Than TXT MY VP
BY Micah L. Sifry | Monday, August 18 2008
Barack Obama's promise to announce his VP pick by text-message -- a smart and obvious ploy to sign up mobile users for future campaign communications -- has been getting a lot of attention this past week, not just from us, but also in a smart op-ed by our friend Garrett Graff in the New York Times, and also today in a (rare for him) catch-up story by the Times' Brian Stelter.
What I hadn't noticed in all this coverage was a quiet but probably more important development: The Obama campaign just rolled out its new mobile platform, m.barackobama.com, which is expressly designed to work on most mobile phones that have internet access. Scott Goodstein, the Obama team's mobile guru, has an understated announcement here. There is no John McCain mobile website.
iLoop Mobile, the company that built the Obama campaign's mobile site, is understandably pretty excited about its work, as you can see from their press release. The platform has a number of cool features, including downloadable wallpaper and ringtones, news content fed dynamically from the main Obama website, the ability to download various white papers, and a goofy "Share the Hope" viral animation to send to friends. Other than the annoyingly cloying "powered by hope" mantra, the site makes sense.
I asked Katrin Verclas of MobileActive, one of the world's experts on all things mobile and political, for her take, and she wrote:
I have checked out the Obama site on a bunch of mobiles and it was ok but this is much, much better. Clean design, nice viral features (share the hope) that allows the campaign to collect additional phone numbers through text-a friend features. Clearly, there is a push in the campaign to collect as many numbers as possible -- presumably for get-out-the vote efforts and conversion to email and donations.
With growing mobile web usage, campaigns need to start paying attention to mobile users who search for and check out content about candidates on their phones. Web growth rates, as evidenced by mobile ad (source: Admob) traffic from the network’s publishers has grown by 104% over the last year, significantly spurred by iPhones, of course (which do not require a WAP [Wireless Application Protocol] site, however).
Candidates who adopt to the mobile web are smart even though they might not see immediate ROI. Obama is clearly on the vanguard, pushing the envelope in both SMS campaign outreach and now with a slick WAP site hoping to generate buy-in with the hip, young crowd.
Interestingly, though, when searching on a mobile for Obama -- search being one of the main areas of growth in mobile web traffic -- the main site still shows up, and there is no redirect to the mobile site from either a blackberry nor a Nokia N95 (which ideally should automatically render m.barackobama.com, reading that I access the site from a mobile...) I'll be curious to see whether that gets fixed.