Mobile Voting Figures Prominently In 2012 Presidential Campaigns
Mobile Voting could play an important role in the 2012 Presidential Election.
A majority of American voters have already “gone mobile.” It’s only natural that voting goes mobile as well.
As the 2012 Presidential Election begins, industry experts predict that a strong mobile presence will play an even larger role than it did four years ago, when forward-thinking mobile initiatives helped propel President Barack Obama to the Oval Office. This time around, those mobile initiatives are likely to include mobile-optimized websites, mobile tie-ins with social media, and candidate apps.
Driving it all could be an SMS marketing feature naturally geared for the political arena: mobile voting. Already being used to great effect by retailers who want to better understand customer opinions, mobile voting uses mass text messaging technology to not only connect with consumers, but to hear what those consumers think. In the case of politics, Democratic and Republican strategists are using mobile voting to satisfy their never-ending efforts to know precisely how select groups of people feel about particular issues.
Short of letting people cast their official election votes via text message, the Mobile Voting feature at TXTin Mobile Marketing is the ideal tool for politicians to increase their understanding of how people feel about important issues. Campaign teams in some districts have already embraced the platform, and are using it to gauge voter opinion and to keep voters informed of important upcoming events as the election heats up. TXTin records every vote and reply message, and every mobile number that participates is captured in a database that can be accessed for future news and text alerts.
Voter feedback is valuable, but so too is the ability to reconnect at any time to those voters. The database of numbers gives political teams the means to direct voters to other important mobile components, whether a link to a mobile website, a Facebook page, or an Internet commercial.
Mobile has already greatly affected retail sales. Many think its impact on politics isn’t far behind. As Bill Dudley, group director of product management at Sybase365, said: “2012 is going to be the year that if a campaign doesn’t do anything with mobile, they’re dead.”
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