President-elect Barack Obama reached out to his wireless supporters, showing the power of mobile when he announced Joe Biden as his running mate through a text message and email campaign in July. On Tuesday night, more than one billion mobile users returned the favor. In the 10 minutes immediately following the official announcement that Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States, the volume of text messages sent surged to more than three times the normal volume for that time of day, according to Sybase 365, a subsidiary of mobile messaging service provider Sybase.
While polling stations around the country closed between 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. CT, Sybase 365 estimates that a total of 1.2 billion SMS messages were sent, 10% higher than on Monday. The hour between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. CT, in particular, was 9% greater than the previous day. Twitter also saw a surge of users on its microblogging service during Tuesday’s election.
From where I stood at the Obama rally with 500,000 other people in Chicago’s Grant Park, the statistics aren’t too surprising, but significant nonetheless. Mobile phones are a powerful tool for personal communication, and text messages are increasingly the preferred means.The power of the mobile phone was a prominent theme throughout Obama’s campaign, which included a dedicated mobile effort with the ability to download ringtones, wallpaper or receive text updates on the issues.
The campaign reached across nearly every major social network and even called upon geographically and demographically targeted advertising messages over Quattro Wireless’ network to encourage voters in key states to vote early. The Internet and social media clearly played a huge supporting role in Obama’s success. Whether or not they play an equally large role in his presidency remains to be seen, but with SMS more popular than ever, he will have a captive audience.