Despite its popularity in voting on TV shows like American Idol, SMS hasn’t yet reached its full potential as a marketing tool for political campaigns, especially when compared to email, web sites, blogs and online videos. Take the 2008 presidential campaigns. While the three Democratic candidates, Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards have been sending supporters updates of their campaigns through text message, Republican candidates have yet to adopt SMS as a campaign tool, reports AFP.

Princeton University graduate student Aaron Strauss, who has researched technology and elections, said candidates see it as a way to get the attention of younger voters whose participation in politics has been disappointing in recent campaigns. Strauss found that persons who received a text message reminder ahead of an election were about four percent more likely to vote than those who did not and predicted that as younger generations of voters became more politically active, the take up of text messaging as a campaign tool will grow.

But for now, it’s unlikely that SMS will have a huge impact with next year’s elections. It probably won’t, for example, motivate “smart mobs” as they did in the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, or around the 2002 South Korean elections. Part of the problem is that SMS usage is still in its infancy in the US, which could be down to its cost. US carriers charge 10 to 15 cents per message, and unlike other parts of the world such as Europe, subscribers often pay to receive as well as send messages—this, analysts say, can make it expensive for heavy users.

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