After an unfortunate hosting issue earlier this week… MediaStyle.ca is back with the Mobile Tech series. Last week featured some community opinion on Foursquare – the geolocation game – and two very different opinions on the game from seasoned PR folk in Toronto. Tomorrow, I’m going to feature some great political iPhone applications and point to a few other mobile tech trends.
Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders gently chided me a few weeks back when I called out a line from his article on a failed mutiny of UK Labour MPs.
The insurrection was announced by text message. And, as Doug reminded me when I heralded this fact, well simply… that it is nothing new in Europe (where texting has been commonplace since the mid 1990’s.)
Why haven’t Canadian politicos integrated mobile/wireless technology into a new style of campaigning? Two key reasons:
1) Cost: The current drawbacks are obvious: text message uptake/utilization in Canada is still well lower than in the UK and Europe. Canadian carriers often charge a lot for and add quotas to their text message plans. Text messaging is expensive compared to tried, tested an true technology.
2) Return on Investment: A few attempts at integrating SMS messages into campaigns have been undertaken in Canada – in 2004, 2006 and 2008 the Dominion Institute (in ’08 they partnered with Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association) to provide “access” to the federal political parties via text message. It worked, but only to a degree. The total number of messages received and answered was relatively low compared to other means of communicating with political parties.
The successful campaign financial equation is always “dollars spent per vote earned.” This is why the next generation of mobile devices and technology should have Canadian politico’s salivating. Why? Image this scenario:
A young woman is walking down the street past her local candidates’ office. The sign in the window reads: download my free iPhone application and learn more about me. So, she does. Now, this young woman is keenly interested in a few issues. She digs into the candidate bio and issues page. On one page – about organic farming – she hits a button that says “keep me updated on this issue”. So, the campaign does.
A day or two later, as she passes a local organic restaurant: her phone pings her – it’s a message from the campaign “We helped get the loan to start this organic restaurant. Would you like more info like this?” She hits yes, happy to know her candidate supports businesses with her values. This happens a few more times over the month long campaign.
And, then on election day her iPhone reminds her when to vote, helps her get there and when she arrives it asks: “Would you like to tell the campaign you voted?” She clicks yes and heads to the local organic grocer; meanwhile the campaign now knows in real time their relationship worked.
There are countless other scenarios I can think of where geolocation combined with applications on an iPhone/iTouch, cell phone and/or Blackberry applications (with push/ping features) and more interactive text messaging would prove useful – and even cost effective. I can even see an augmented reality application for communities to spot areas of improvement. Once political parties see costs come down on mobile tech – they can see the ROI go up and the cost per vote earned go down.
But, a few things need to happen first for Canadian politics to be truly mobile ready:
- IT departments in legislatures (and city halls) need to allow their users to download Blackberry applications;
- Political offices must budget for these mobile applications ($100-150 per employee equipped with a smartphone);
- Investment in internal and proprietary political applications will speed up the overall adoption process;
- Linking politicians directly to their social media channels; certainly political staff will want some control over these online communities – instead of managing them they should be encouraged to participate respectfully. Working to drop the cloak of secrecy and circumstance we place around our political leaders is key.
