General election candidates have missed a trick by failing to harness the power of SMS to help with their campaigns. So says Jay Seaton, chief marketing officer at Airwide Solutions, who believes that while the mainstream political parties have been using the internet and social media as campaign tools, they have not made the most of mobile.

“The Conservative party offered text updates and Labour offered a text alert to remind voters to step into the polling office. Liberal Democrat candidate for the newly-created constituency of Hampstead and Kilburn, turned to mobile payment service provider paythru, to help him raise funds. But the focus on SMS by the main three political parties has not been high,” says Seaton.

Seaton compares the UK example with that of President Obama in the US. “Obama’s campaign featured a mobile page that allowed people to download ringtones and wallpaper, sign up for twitter feeds and receive text alerts about policy and campaign events,” he says. “62262 was also registered as a shortcode, which numerically represents the word Obama. At $1.26 per voter in the US, SMS campaigning also proved to be cheaper than traditional canvassing and automated calls, which come in at $20-30.”

Seaton adds that in New Hampshire, the Obama campaign sent its supporters three SMS messages over the course of primary day to remind them to vote and to encourage their friends to vote. There, Obama won the 18-to-24-year-old bracket by nearly 40 points, the largest split of any age bracket.

“Political parties in the UK can learn from this innovative use of SMS,” says Seaton. “A huge part of the UK voting population don’t own a high-end smartphone or use mobile data, many still have no broadband connection. However, a large part of this group will have a mobile phone that is SMS capable. This is a market that can be addressed by the political parties through SMS, where they can be reached in a targeted and personal way instantaneously. SMS campaigning reaped dividends for President Obama, and it could do the same for UK political parties too.”

Paul Berney, European managing director of the Mobile Marketing Association, shares Seaton’s disappointment. He says: “After the Obama campaign, I think we convinced ourselves that mobile had played big part in mobilising the electorate, and there was this expectation that political parties would get it, but the effort from the three main parties in this election on mobile has been pretty poor. They all have an iPhone app, but the Conservatives are the only ones doing text updates, and they are pretty anodyne.”
Berney notes that the Conservative and Lib Dem apps are not particularly comprehensive, and wonders whether, like many brands, the approach to mobile has been to create an iPhone app and then forget about doing anything else.

“They seem to have started from the premise of saying: ‘We need an iPhone app’ rather than developing a strategy to use mobile to enfranchise the electorate,” he says. “It’s disappointing; this ought to have been the election where people really noticed mobile, but it just hasn’t happened.”