A lot of people waited for the 3am text message which Barack Obama promised would inform the ordinary person who his pick for Veep was going to be before the MSM. Then they saw the announcement that Joe Biden would be his running mate on the news. The inbox of their text messages still had nothing. SFGate tells the story:
But hours before the text was sent, the campaign’s famously tight communications ship sprung a leak. So the first to know that Sen. Joseph Biden would be in Springfield on Saturday were not those who had signed up for a text message, but those who were watching cable television news programs at around 10:45 p.m.
The article goes on to say that “tech problems” may have prevented Obama’s publicists from keeping their word. That raises the question: had anybody ever heard about development, test and production? How can you promise production without the previous two? But if the text subscribers got nothing, Obama got something. A database. “Now it has a way to contact an estimated 3 million mobile phone users. Because the system it used categorized recipients by ZIP code, the campaign will be able to easily contact those folks in the final days of the campaign when their focus will be on getting out the vote.”
“From a tech point of view, the mass (text) message seems to have failed,” wrote Micah Sifry, co-founder of techpresident.com, which examines the impact of technology on politics. “But from an earned media standpoint, and an organizing standpoint, the mass (text) experiment looks pretty successful. Three million names is phenomenal, especially if they can now segment them by ZIP code.
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