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Monday, August 25, 2008

Obama's VP text message: you'll be the 7,394th to know.

Media beat Obama to the punch. By design?

The Obama campaign spent $130,000 with Distributive Networks, a privately-held mobile marketing solutions company, to pull off this nationwide VP information dissemination designed to scoop the msm and 'fist bump' with the Obama campaign's target demographic - the youth vote. They hoped. Or did they? Surely Distributive Networks informed the Obama campaign of the risks in such a massive, high tech venture.

The Democratic presidential candidate got scooped by the media on his own announcement, done in by dogged reporting, loose-lipped party insiders and the limits of technology.

Not to mention the wireless distribution of that VP announcement took place at 3 a.m. Saturday - hardly prime time.
By then, it was old news, by today's standards. The media had reported the pick more than two hours earlier.

Wireless text technology is not fool proof, and delays on such a nationwide scale are inevitable. Macro networks of micro wave towers, like the bandwidth of your server, can be overloaded.
Michael Silberman, a partner at online communications firm EchoDitto, said the campaign gambled when they made such a high-stakes promise and find themselves in a precarious situation where they could risk a great deal of trust with supporters.

Besides, you didn't expect the obamanator to leave his fair & balanced, unbiased buddies in the MSM out in the cold, did ya?

So if it's by design, what's the payoff? A huge database of cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses for the fall campaign. Not too mention mega web traffic to the obamanator's site, and nearly $2 million in online donations over the weekend.