Article Review: The Politics-To-Go Handbook

The Politics-To-Go Handbook provides an overview of the use of mobile phones for advocacy and marketing campaigns.  Touching on everything from a general overview of the technology, the use of mobile for canvassing, privacy, security, and specific case studies, the manual is a one-stop shop for information related to mobile phones.  And to be perfectly honest, I found most of it useless.

I hate to go off on a bit of a rant here, but I've found this reading and others to be painfully lacking in any sort of actual guidance.  So much of the reading is surface level - take, for example, this excerpt, from page 47:

Hire the right staff. - The best strategy for any mobile campaign is to employ a good copy writer.  Hire someone who knows how to use the space effectively.

So basically: use mobile campaigns, but hire somebody to do it for you.  This completely rubs me the wrong way.  Isn't the point of this manual to demonstrate HOW to use the space effectively?

My biggest complaint with this reading - and with some of the others that we've touched on - is a lack of real world demonstration and application to teach you the ins and outs of ACTUALLY using these technological advances.  It is fine and good to discuss the overall ideas - use mobile to reach people while they're out and about; use double opt-in strategies; don't spam; have a call to action - but without demonstrating the best methods to actually do this, we're still wandering in the dark.  So much of this manual and some of the others we've read simply restate many key themes over and over again - so much so, in fact, that the manual is summed in in a page of takeaways on page two.  I could have simply read page two and walked away with much of the same insight that I did having read over 100 pages of material. 

C'mon people - if you're experts, show us your expertise.  Demonstrate successful campaigns.  Give us some examples of things that didn't or don't work.  Don't just spout off generalizations that are true of most marketing and communications mediums, no matter what the technology is.  Knowing your audience, engaging them, finding ways to appeal to them...these are pretty generic realities.

Rant about the manual itself aside, I want to tackle the idea of mobile as a larger concept.  Personally, I don't believe that mobile marketing is going to catch on in the United States as it has in the rest of the world.  The reason for this is simple: technology is going to surpass it very quickly.  This reading was published September 13, 2005, and focused largely on technology and usages from 2004 and years previous.  To date, over four years later, mobile marketing remains an outlier in the United States, and hasn't shown significant signs of making huge inroads in the corporate, political, or non-profit world.  If it doesn't do so soon, there will be no reason for it to do so.

Why?  Simple: the technology will surpass SMS.  The third point in the "Top Ten Takeaways" is that text is king.  Well, that isn't going to be the case for long.  SMS will still be used - but as was mentioned throughout the manual, Americans came to email and computing before they came to SMS.  We use it more generally and are more accustomed to it than we are SMS.  In 2005, when this was published, the iPhone wasn't even a concept yet.  Smart phones are increasingly popular, inexpensive, and dominant in the market, and are only going to become moreso as the technology gets cheaper.  My feeling is that this will relegate SMS messaging as a permanent second class citizen.  Why limit your message to a text when you can email somebody and still reach them wherever they are?

This is not to say that I don't think mobile marketing or messaging is important.  The section on VRM was outstanding, and will likely be a key component of canvassing forever more.  But the handbook explicitly makes a point that I fundamentally disagree with (p. 26): "The mobile phone is not the new computer; it is the new phone."  It is not just the new phone - it is ALSO the new computer, especially given the rise of smart phones and the increasingly complex tasks they can accomplish.  This is why more computing companies are becoming active in mobile - because computers and computer operating systems are able to accomplish more tasks than mobile platforms. 

At this juncture, I think mobile is more likely to become an extension of your online strategy than it will be a standalone, independent tool.  There are certainly interesting uses of mobile technology available - and it can be a useful extension of other campaigns.  But if you'll note - in the domestic examples given in Politics-To-Go, total respondents are never mentioned.  My suspicion is that this is due to low total numbers of response rates - even if the click throughs, open rates, or success rates are high.  Sure, its great that it works a high percentage of the time - but if your overall penetration into a community or target group is very low to begin with, is it really worth the time, money and infrastructure needed to get the campaign off the ground?

If widespread mobile campaigning hasn't happened already - and it seems that it has not - by the time Americans are ready to adopt SMS for advocacy and organization, the technology will enable us to do far more with our mobile devices than has been imagined to date.  This reading seemed dated to me, and thus, not terribly useful.