Obama relies on SMS for Cairo speech distribution

By Dan Butcher

June 16, 2009

Barack Obama is the 44th president of the United States

Earlier this month, President Barack Obama gave a historic speech from Cairo, Egypt and provided speech highlights via text message to ensure public reach.

The U.S. State Department used mobile phones to provide anywhere, anytime access to portions of the speech, which enabled and encouraged conversations worldwide with the goal of creating the world's first "mobile town hall without borders." This mobile service allowed interested citizens from around the world to receive speech highlights via text message.

"Delivering President Obama's Speech highlights via SMS met a critical ‘public reach' objective important to the U.S. Department of State and White House -- because of the ubiquity of the mobile phone and SMS -- the opportunity to reach people who would not ordinarily receive information or communications about President Obama's historic speech was realized," said Chuck Drake, executive vice president of marketing for Clickatell, Redwood City, CA.

The U.S. State Department tapped Clickatell for the initiative, which provides reach to more than 775 mobile networks in more than 275 countries.

To register for the service, interested citizens needed to complete an online registration form. This service was brought to the public free of charge.

The English Web site for SMS sign-ups

Once completed, all participants received live President Obama speech highlights during the actual speech.

Opted-in participants received up to ten excerpts from the speech, which were be determined by the White House administration.

People around the world were permitted to sign up at http://www.america.gov/sms.html to receive live SMS speech communications. This Web site was also provided in four languages, including English, Persian, Arabic and Urdu.

The Web site for SMS sign-ups in Arabic

Posted SMS two-way replies from enrolled participants can be found at http://www.america.gov/obama_cairo.html.

This program was open to all citizens outside the U.S. worldwide.

The Obama Cairo Speech SMS Service made use of mobile's broad reach, with speech highlights going out in real time.

"In many countries around the world, the access to traditional media is limited, filtered or in some cases even blocked," Mr. Drake said. "If only TV, radio or other forms of traditional media were available, then some media sources would have limited the message reach, filtering, interpreting and delaying the message.

"Therefore, by using a global SMS campaign powered by Clickatell, ‘getting the message to the people' was greatly enhanced," he said.

"This campaigned also offered something that other traditionally media sources cannot easily do or simply don't do: provide a mechanism for the public to provide their personal comments and opinions about the Obama Cairo speech to be received and then made broadly public, instantly."

Without the innovative SMS two-way aspect of this campaign, there would be no way to support a "send in your comments" town-hall-style interaction aspect using only traditional media sources, according to Clickatell.

With SMS, highlights from the Obama Speech were sent live and participants around the world could text-in their comments, similar to a Town Hall approach but over the mobile phone using SMS.

The reach of the program exceeded initial projection estimates, with responses counted thus far in the thousands across more than 150 countries worldwide, according to Clickatell.

Several U.S. Embassies worldwide advertised the program on their public Web sites, including in Singapore, Lebanon and Israel.

In addition, the U.S. State Department also announced the program on Facebook and White House press activities also helped to get the word out about the program.

The Obama Speech SMS campaign was rapidly conceived, planned, organized and executed in less than one week.

The U.S. Deptartment of State came to Clickatell with their requirements for the program with less than five business days notice.

"Clickatell has the online experience needed as we looked to build an online Web SMS registration and support process," Mr. Drake said. "Clickatell is focused on meeting a higher standard of quality of service and messaging delivery requirements, as exemplified with their enterprise customer base of over 8,300 clients.

"Clickatell understands what it takes to build and support an SMS system that can draw the people in and keep them informed," he said.

"At this point, the U.S. Department of Stare is contemplating future uses of this highly successful Obama Speech SMS campaign."