Report on Mobile Media

I recommend skipping directly to page 22 of that document where it
gets into specifics. There are some ideas there.

"In the Philippines, mobile action around political campaigns is common. In fact, an entire election was deeply affected by a political zinger of a “ringtone”implying that the incumbent was guilty of vote rigging. It was downloaded by more than 1 million people."

"The Spanish national election in March 2004 that followed the tragic Al Qaeda Madrid train bombings was affected by mobile action. The governing Popular Party initially indicated that the bombing may have been done not by Islamic terrorists but rather by Spanish separatists. Then, despite an official ban on political demonstrations in the 24 hours prior to the election, massive protests nonetheless materialized due to the unique, spontaneous organizing power of text messaging and email. Millions of text messages and emails were sent, some pro and some anti the government."

"Soon the video screen atop the stage flashes a five-digit number above the word ‘UNITE.’ ‘Time to do a magic trick,’ he says. ’These little devices - these cell phones - they can do all sorts of things.’ Then the band launches into the song ‘One,’ and Bono encourages the audience to use their phones to send a text message (also known as an SMS) to the one.org Web site, a sort of digital petition voicing support for poverty relief in Africa. Later, during the encore, the names of all who did so are scrolled on the same screen, and each receive a message of thanks from Bono on their phones.”59Soon 59
U2 would generate about 10,000 mobile responses a night, and generated over 800,000 responses during the entire Vertigo tour,60 and over 2.3 million US users subscribed to the One Campaign over 12 months through text messaging.6061"

on to the recommendations:
"On your campaign or political web site, if you already ask users to register with your site for things like email, or other services, be sure to ask for their mobile phone number and mobile info specifically. You should tell them that this is for future opt-in based mobile use and will not be sold or passed to other groups."

"Mobile takes more time to set up than Internet applications do. It often takes a two or three month’s running start to set up even a relatively simple text messaging application. Don't wait until the last minute. Also, mobile marketing efforts to date have been successful over longer terms – several months - rather than shorter bursts. With this sort of time frame in mind, the 2006 elections are perhaps available for groups that started today. On the other hand, even for “permanent campaigns” from interest groups, voter outreach organizations, and for local, State and Federal efforts around 2008, you can't start planning too early."

Is it? What is so deadly about sms vs "internet applications"?
Assuming this is true, this would seem to be a place for this group to focus some attention? "easy sms for union klutzes" :-)

"Plan for mobile to be integrated with everything in your overall media and public outreach campaign. This is similar to how more effective campaigns treat the integration of the Internet. Mobile contact points should be featured in every commercial, every campaign letter, and every email."

I think this article actually shows that all the media, land phone, email,the web, radio, tv, sms etc need to be employed simultaneously because there is such heterogeneity of media use. Everyone doesn't use sms, everyone doesn't use email, etc. The downside would be that if every time a union wants people to do something (which can happen at least every hour of every day in an over-activist area like I live in), that
the union has to create a custom ring tone, a longer musical product, a video product, a voice announcement, an email announcement, a pdf file for offset printing, everything in html, everything in sms, etc. that's a lot of media to produce (for which the authors of the above article wish to sell their services). (This is the danger to traditional unions IMHO, that they'll decide they need SMS and thus dump bales of scarce percap money on glitzy media consultants, creating a top down uniform 'one message fits all' ad campaign, mandating the one true ringtone all members should be using,the one sms logo, etc branding dreck.)

But examples, like the immigrant mobilization, don't sound like they were really based on a full scale media productions run by MBA marketting experts. We're talking about individuals sending messages to their friends, messages probably from private phone numbers to
private phone numbers. I would question whether that is a scenario really amenable to harnessing by some union media meisters. But I guess it's true I'm beat down from being in the trenches where you will call fellow unionists at your peril (our people do not like spontaneous phone calls), you email them at your peril (they don't like "too much" email), they don't like too much paper... they want to pay their dues and then someone else does some stuff and the membership is not bothered about it in any way. Would they watch the entertaining union video with attractive actors instead of the homely overweight real unionists? :-) Would they play the exciting union computer game? Might be worth a shot I suppose. People who like to get a lot of messages from anywhere and are willing to do something truly are a different breed than a lot of legacy unionists who are extremely protective of their "space". If these people really do exist I would really like to know them too!

http://www.aft.org/textme/