Given that close to 200 million Americans have mobile phones, everyone wants the youth vote, and we live in a viral 24 hour news cycle, some believe that mobile can change the landscape of the political election. So you would think that the two major party candidates would use their swollen advertising budgets to leverage mobile as a marketing and communications tool. Sadly this is not the case. I wanted to take a look at what the candidates are doing in mobile, or with mobile, and also look at how easily and inexpensively they could grow this channel. After all, both of these guys want to convince us that they have their fingers on the pulse of technology and what the average American is doing. With that in mind I decided to take off my industry insider hat and look at this from an outside perspective. To help, I interviewed family, friends, and marketers not involved with mobile. First let’s look at Obama. I give him a C. Given the recent findings by Nielsen Mobile that democrats use mobile data and the mobile web more, you might expect better. He got a lot of press for announcing his VP pick via text message and I thought this could lead to great things. Most people know by now that Obama has a great website and a strong, to put it mildly, fundraising ability using different channels. Most people I know who are either Obama supporters or undecided said that they got their information on the candidate either on the web site or through email. So, I went to the web to see if there was any mention of mobile. After a lot of scrolling I found a link to an Obama Mobile page. I was hopeful that this would guide me to a mobile Internet site but it basically led to a landing page to sign up for text alerts and Twitter, as well as the ability to receive a link to the mobile site via SMS by texting “Site” to 62262. All good things, but they could be doing more. I naturally then turned to my good friends at Google and found a link to ObamaMobile.mobi. Great site, highly functional, good design, etc.--except none of the people I talked to knew that it existed and now they all go to, and love, the site. That was easy. My question for the Obama camp is why aren’t they promoting the mobile site more prominently? I get SMS messages from the campaign all the time to tune in to the debate or volunteer – yet none of these provide a link to the mobile site. Why not? Isn’t that the most obvious way to get someone who is mobile to engage immediately? The only message that included a link to the mobile site was when I tried to download a ringtone for my iPhone (which isn’t supported by the way.) Now let’s look at McCain. I will admit that he is at a bit of a disadvantage, having admitted to being computer illiterate and just learning about Google but still, I would have to give his campaign an F. Again, I started on this website. Nothing. I went to the search feature on his site and typed in mobile. The first link, with 82% relevancy to the word mobile, was link to a service to add email names to a list of friends. Ok, well maybe they have laptops. The rest were links to articles about conference calls. Again, maybe he made those calls from a mobile phone, I don’t know. Either way, why is the McCain campaign ignoring this channel altogether or very basically hiding its content? I went to Google and did find a link to McCainMobile.com, which clearly isn’t anything associated with the campaign. In fact, I’m amazed that the campaign staff is so completely out of touch with mobile that they aren’t even bothered by others trying to use his name to collect phone numbers. It seems to me that each campaign could do very simple things to open an enormous community of users in a way that would grow participation in the campaign, raise money, increase web traffic, and generate new buzz. Here are three basic ideas. 1. Promote mobile in all media. Basic marketing tells us that cross channel marketing is the most effective way to disseminate. Web traffic increases mobile traffic increases brand interaction etc.... Basically these guys are in a race to build brand after all. 2. Encourage participation. Mobile is a great channel to encourage direct participation. Just ask anyone at American Idol if it works. Listen to constituents, spin, update, and give out early information. Let surrogates in on talking points, damage control, appearance updates. The list is literally limitless. 3. Show basic understanding of the most pervasive communications tool in the world. Through a good mobile presence both candidates could demonstrate an ability to connect in a way that millions of Americans connect with each other everyday. To us in the industry this all may sound elementary but none of this happened in the campaign from either side. Now with 30 some odd days left this may go down as huge lost opportunity.