Obama elevates campaign with sophisticated mobile site

By Dan Butcher

August 18, 2008

Barack Obama has created a mobile Web site with content related to the presidential campaign, voter interactivity and viral messaging showcasing the power of mobile audience engagement.

Mobile marketing software solutions provider iLoop Mobile is powering the mobile Internet presence at http://m.barackobama.com or http://obamamobile.mobi for Sen. Obama’s presidential campaign. The mobile site will enable supporters, media and the general voting public to receive the latest news, campaign developments and multimedia Obama content anytime, anywhere, via their mobile phone.

“For Obama the important thing was that we present a complete solution for any type of content such as text, video and interactivity and the ability to mobilize his Web page,” said Michael Becker, executive vice president of business development for iLoop, San Jose, CA.

“We offer a turn-key solution over all mobile and Internet channels and provide the software, professional services and training so brands can effectively use our mFinity platform,” he said.

The news comes soon after the Obama campaign said it will soon announce his choice of vice president through email and text message in a deft move that will also balloon his database (see story).

People can access the Obama campaign’s mobile Web page by texting SITE to 62262 or by going to http://m.barackobama.com or http://obamamobile.mobi on their Web-enabled mobile phone’s browser.

BarackBerry

“This will allow the campaign to reach the millions of constituents who have already opted in to their SMS database and provide links via text message to click through to the media-rich environment of mobile Internet,” Mr. Becker said.

“Many more people will opt in from the mobile Web site and we can drop them right into their existing messaging database, so we’ve been able to tie the two pieces together,” he said.

The iLoop mFinity platform lets brands, marketing agencies, content owners and other companies create mobile phone initiatives worldwide.

Celling voters

The program offers a self-service integrated solution for creating and managing all types of SMS marketing and messaging, mobile Internet sites, mobile advertising, Web sites for mobile content delivery and other mobile initiatives and services.

The iLoop-powered Obama mobile site engages voters using a wide array of mobile capabilities, each tactically deployed for specific communications objectives such as raising voter awareness to Sen. Obama’s position on key political issues, driving viral voter communications to get out the vote and engaging the voter with videos, images, ringtones and information.

The news and press releases sections of the site selects and extracts content automatically from the Obama broadband Web site and dynamically places it in the mobile site instantly as it changes.

Other Obama mobile features include opt-in to SMS alerts for appearance schedules, speeches and downloadable content such as videos, wallpapers and ringtones, as well as a viral tell-a-friend component on every page of the site, which allows a user to easily forward the site to another person’s phone.

The Share the Hope viral component lets users forward an animated image to a friend with a personal message attached.

There is a Meet Barack section with media-rich bio information. Video downloads of portions of important Obama speeches are also available.

Also, there is a rotating ad banner, so that every time people visit the site, they will see a link to a different position paper explaining Sen. Obama’s policy views. The subjects of the eight essays are energy, economy, Iraq, education, ethics, healthcare, technology and veterans.

“If people enter in their email address, it’ll actually email them a copy of the position papers,” Mr. Becker said.

“We’re helping them to leverage ad-serving technology, but instead of spinning different ads, we’re spinning different content,” he said.

The site’s mobile voting portal polls the users’ opinions on various issues.

The Obama campaign has received an enormous amount of attention for its groundbreaking use of digital media and the creation of vast communities of supporters.

The Illinois Democrat's new mobile Internet presence is an example of the Obama campaign’s evolving digital strategy to foster interactivity with voters.

“What makes Obama's site unique is that it can push users from the Web to the mobile Web to email and create user-generated content and viral buzz through peer-to-peer messaging,” Mr. Becker said.

“If I get something from my friend, he is a very trusted source, so if he sends me a link to Obama’s mobile site, that is much more persuasive since it’s coming from a peer, as opposed to other marketing devices that aren’t as personal,” he said.

This is just one of the ways in which the Obama campaign is leveraging technology to its advantage.

“They’re using their network of blogs, they have an incredible social networking and widgeting solution and they’re doing an amazing job of leveraging the social sphere,” Mr. Becker said.

“Today consumers are a vital part of the marketing, and the viral components let people to share in the vision and power of what he’s doing and every voter can become a proponent and spread the message to other potential voters by clicking a single button on their handset," he said.

“This is one of those few mobile sites that have done it really well.” 

Comments on "Obama elevates campaign with sophisticated mobile site"

1. Ruth Calabria says:

   August 29, 2008 at 5:59pm

   The New Obama-McCain Equation
   
   Our blog explains why fundamentalists urge sinners to obey, obey, obey, why conservatives are caught so frequently in men’s rooms with their pants down and why the world is soon going up in nuclear smoke unless we Democrats manage to shoo the conservative crazies out of Washington, the distraction of the Republican’s nominating a sweet variety of fundamentalist conservative crazy as Vice President aside. As unpleasant and irrelevant as most assume mathematics to be in any reasonable political argument, our science trained, politically concerned family has derived an evolution equation that shows people’s unhappiness in life to come from excess social control, as in the workplace, and that shows that unhappiness to be the primary cause of aggressive behavior, including both the petty meanness that permeates day to day American life nowadays and the violence exported across national borders as war. This evolution equation has been certified 100% correct by Dr. Sean Rice of Texas Tech who wrote the textbook on classical mathematical evolution. We call our version of the equation the Obama-McCain equation after the two men whose struggle for the presidency will determine the fate, not just of our nation, but of the world. Simply, for all you many math hating voters, the equation explains the biological drive in us talking animals to mate and raise babies and to struggle aggressively for resources and territory, all of which normal behaviors have taken the most violent and perverse turns in modern times, however much these less appealing characteristics of the modern human animal are generally hidden from view by our near propagandistic media.
   
   Less technically, our website tells the story of how our three generation family originally supported Barack Obama, campaigning for him in West Virginia and appearing for him on CBS NEWS, and then switched to Hillary when we saw up close that Barack’s exceptionally good fortune in succeeding at an American dream that is no more than a pie in the sky mollifying promise for the average American, was blinding him to the unhappiness that most people have no choice but to endure in life, that unhappiness of people collectively being the primary cause of both campus mass murders in America and the kind of unnecessary wars that the conservative crazies have got us into and, if war mad Uncle John and sweet Sara get into office, will escalate to global war with Uncle John’s old enemy from Vietnam days, nuclear armed Russia. With sensible Hillary out of the game, we have now furiously switched back to hopefully wised up Obama at the thought of slimy McCain as the next-in-line Hitler head of the Wall Street conservative police state that has ruled our lives for the last eight years and got us into a mentally aberrant unnecessary war that has killed and crippled over a million people, 30,000 of them American kids. So pay no attention to petty annoyances that may arise from our all too human candidates, Senators Obama and Biden, and join with us in our mathematically intensified fears to do everything possible to get all yet sane people to vote for them and insure the defeat of the conservative wolves now cutely dressed in Sister Sara sheep’s clothing.
   
   Mrs. Ruth and Dr. Peter V. Calabria and family, at www.matrix-evolutions.com if you want to read more.