His campaign for the White House is just now shifting into high gear, but Sen. Barack Obama is already a winner… in Cannes, France.

That’s where his Obama Mobile messaging campaign won a 2008 Mobile Messaging award in the non-profit or public-sector category. The accolade was one of five awards handed out by research firm Informa and the mobile industry group 160 Characters at this year’s Global Messaging Conference. And it went to interactive mobile firm SinglePoint and mobile content and platform provider Distributive Networks for the part they played in putting the Obama campaign so effectively onto his supporters’ handsets.

First launched last August, Obama Mobile was designed to make it simple for interested voters to sign up. All they had to do was text GO to the short code OBAMA (62262) and they could be signed up to receive breaking news from the campaign, issue updates and content from the campaign or to send comments and questions back.

Users can even customize the issue updates they receive via their mobile phones by texting the words HEALTH, EDUCATION, IRAQ, JOBS or REFORM to the same short code.

They can also opt in by going to a site specifically designed for mobile, www.barackobama.com/mobile, and entering their cell phone number. There they’ll also find Obama-based ringtones and mobile wallpapers they can download for free (not counting carriers’ data charges).

This was actually the second award won by Obama Mobile and its platform support. In March, the Graduate School of political management of George Washington University gave the campaign its Golden Dot award for best mobile/ text messaging campaign at its “Politics Online” conference.

What has Obama been doing right in courting the mobile electorate? Several things, and some of them pretty simple. For one thing, Obama Mobile was the only campaign to acquire and use a vanity short code that’s easy to remember: the candidate’s name.

(The Clinton campaign couldn’t follow suit, since U.S. short codes are commonly five or six digits long—one too short for her name, unless she was going to encourage fans to misspell it. Their solution was to ask people to send JOIN to 442008. According to her campaign, that stood for her hope to become the 44th President in 2008. Not a useful mnemonic unless you happen to be related to Number 42.)

Then the Obama campaign began promoting that code heavily at rallies like the one in South Carolina last December at which Oprah Winfrey endorsed the candidate, according to Rich Begert, SinglePoint president and CEO.

“They advertised the short code on a large screen so the audience could immediately opt into this somewhat social network,” he says. “We’ve been doing that for years for companies like Red Bull as they put on their events. Obviously when you’re at a rally like that, you don’t have access to your laptop. But everyone has their mobile phone with them, and it’s an easy way to discover something and opt into it immediately. The mobile call to action is very powerful.”

Tactics like that have allowed the Obama campaign to amass a large database of cell phone numbers. They won’t reveal how large it is, but during the primary season the candidate appeared at a number of rallies as large as 30,000 people. Kevin Bertram, CEO of Distributive Networks, points to an ad Obama ran during the Super Bowl that asked viewers to text HOPE to the 62262 code.

“While the campaign won’t disclose the response to that, I can say it was very overwhelming,” Bertram says.

But getting the numbers is only part of the trick; Obama Mobile also made a concerted effort to go back to those mobile opt-ins and get them to volunteer more information about where they live. That was especially important during the primaries, to ensure that get-out-the-vote text messages only went to those sign-ups who would actually be voting in a given contest.

“They had a pretty sophisticated list-management system to use keywords to determine where people were participating, and some interesting ways to get people to supply their address or specifically their ZIP codes,” Bertram says. The campaign did this by using text messages to offer incentives such as a special bumper sticker that you could only get by replying with a home address and ZIP.

It’s those ZIP codes the Obama campaign really wants, because they help in geo-targeting supporters, letting the campaign know which registrants with a 202 area code (Washington D.C.) live in the neighborhood of American University, for example, and are thus more likely to be students.

“That’s important because if there’s a rally coming up in San Diego, you don’t necessarily want to be sending alert notices to people too far from there,” Bertram says.

Messages were also forwardable, to take advantage of users’ social connections and build viral buzz.

As for the messages themselves, they ranged beyond the standard voter activation calls. Supporters were able to text in and raise their hands to volunteer campaign support down to the will to put out lawn signs. Registrants also got alerts about dates, times and channels of televised debates, personalized for their locales and for any special issue areas they had expressed interest in, such as healthcare, the environment or the war in Iraq.

During the early TV debates the Obama campaign also devised what it called a “catchall queue” that let opted viewers text their responses and comments on specific points in real time during the broadcasts. Those comments then went up on Sen. Obama’s blog site or were distributed through Twitter. “That generated a sense of participation that created lots of goodwill for the campaign,” says Bertram. “That’s something I don’t think the other candidates were able to do.”

One thing Obama Mobile hasn’t done has been to solicit contributions. That’s more easily done through e-mails that link back to the Web site where those transactions can be handled.

But fundraising too may be something future political campaigns will be able to bring to mobile messaging. Carriers are becoming more open to the prospect of letting subscribers use their phones to make contributions to non-profit organizations that have what’s called 501(c)3 status with the Internal Revenue Service. These non-profits can’t directly fund political campaigns, but they can educate voters on issues, and mobile carriers could eventually decide to broaden that to include some legislative lobbying.

Begert says that contribution tool might be in place by the November 2008 election. “There’s been significant progress made by the carriers to bypass their usual fees for a charitable donation and to do the billing and collection,” he says.

But Bertram believes carriers’ natural conservatism will keep them from jumping into raising funds for groups even marginally political in time for the fall contest. “I don’t know that they will loosen up their process for groups that aren’t 501(c)3s,” he says. “I hope they do, because that will be a fantastic use of the technology.”