Recent developments in both the Democratic and Republican campaigns have given more proof—if it was needed—that Web 3.0 tactics are reaching into every aspect of our lives. They’ve also provided some operational lessons that marketers of brands a bit more everyday than the U.S. presidency should be watching closely.

For example, the Obama campaign used its convention milestone to bring its text-messaging campaign to a new pitch. Since at least a year ago April, Obama’s campaign staffers have been using both his Web site and his live appearances to ask supporters to pull out their mobile phones and text “HOPE” to 62262 (short code for “Obama”, luckily for them.)

Supporters who comply are asked to text in their ZIP codes to get updates about Democratic campaign events in their areas. By opting in, of course, they also become part of a phone number database that will pretty undoubtedly come in handy in getting out the vote on Election Day. And the fact that database has so many mobile phone numbers—which, remember, are untouchable by the automatic dialers candidates can still use to reach your home landline phone—makes it all the more valuable.

No word from the Democratic campaign about how big that phone bank is now. But Nielsen Mobile floated an estimate of the size of the single most notable Obama mobile events: the naming of his vice presidential pick about ten days ago. On Aug. 10, the campaign announced that those who had registered their mobile phone numbers at the OBAMA short code would receive the name of the running mate before anyone else: at 3 a.m. EDT on Saturday, Aug. 24, before Obama and Biden appeared at a rally in Springfield IL.

After that weekend Nielsen Mobile, a division of The Nielsen Co., estimated that 2.9 million U.S. mobile subscribers got a text message from the Obama campaign over the course of Friday, Saturday and Sunday carrying the news of the running mate selection.

Nielsen extrapolated the scope of the text messaging effort by studying short code marketing to its phone bill payment panel, an opt-in group of 40,000 subscribers who voluntarily let Nielsen monitor their telecommunications billing.

“It’s clear that this is the biggest single SMS marketing event to date,” Covey says. “I’ve looked at some of the biggest participation-TV events of the last few years, and at campaigns from some brands that have done a great job of employing SMS. But nobody’s been able to pull 2.9 million uniques.”

That last point is important, Covey says. Other SMS campaigns have racked up bigger raw traffic numbers; for example, AT&T claims that last season’s “American Idol” audience sent 78 million text messages over the course of the TV season. But those votes come from a much smaller base of senders, since fans can vote as many times as they want for their Idol favorites.

“We’ve found that ‘American Idol’ fans tend to text in about 38 votes a month,” Covey says. “So when you see these very impressive numbers, they represent multiple votes from participants—many multiples, in some cases.” That gives the Obama SMS effort the edge in total audience.

And those mobile opt-ins can have a viral impact. After submitting their ZIP code, mobile supporters get back a thank-you message directing them to http://ObamaMobile.mobi. That’s the campaign’s mobile-optimized site, where they can download videos and ringtones but just as importantly tell a friend about Obama Mobile—something especially easy to do on a device like a mobile phone with a built-in address book.

Use of the text-message medium also gave the Obama campaign a chance to drive traffic to its own Web site. As Techpresident co-founder Andrew Rasiej pointed out in his blog [http://www.techpresident.com/blog/entry/29120/the_medium_is_the_text_message], the message carrying Biden’s name also told supporters they could watch that first public unveiling of the whole ticket in Springfield on the campaign’s main Web site, www.BarackObama.com.

“With almost 50% of Americans now getting their political news online and with over 60% of American homes connected to broadband, the Obama campaign is shrewdly using this new infrastructure to literally leapfrog the mainstream media and deliver their message to their supporter and potential supporters directly,” Rasiej writes.That means being able to get that message out without network mediation, and to foster more engagement with grass-roots supporters—engagement that could pay off in numerous small-scale constributions.

Obama staffers also managed to marry mobile marketing to a live event with the 70,000 people who packed into Invesco Field in Denver to hear the candidate himself speak on the last night of the Democratic convention. By some estimates, as many as half the attendees complied with the pre-show request to “get out your cell phones” and text in to 62262 with ZIP codes.

The outdoor arena’s Jumbotron screen showed a large map of the United States, and staffers promised the map would interact with audience calls to show how well individual states were producing support for the candidate.

Just as ballgame attendees guess the stadium attendance with cheers, the campaign also used the big stadium screen to run SMS quizzes during the non-Obama portions of Thursday night’s Invesco program. The audience was asked multiple-choice questions about Obama’s platform and input their answers via their handsets. (“How large would Senator Obama’s tax credit for college students be? Text E4 to 62262 to say $1000…”)

By the end of the evening, staffers announced that some 30,000 calls had been received. While many of those were probably already in the Obama phone database, Rasiej points out that lots of the tickets at the Thursday event went out to Colorado-area residents—and Colorado is one of the contested swing states being courted by both the Democrats and Republicans this fall. Sure enough, Colorado had one of the largest stars on the interactive map.

Not that Obama’s SMS campaigns have always come off without a hitch, of course. In the Biden instance, the Obama campaign made much of the notion that it was tending to its supporters first and the news media second. That turned the name of the running mate into a challenge—one traditional media was willing to accept.

And the old ways won: The Biden selection was scooped by CNN at about midnight the evening before the announcement. In fact, while the text messages started broadcasting at 3 a.m. on Saturday, a number of supporters still had not received theirs by breakfast time that morning.

The snafus point up the difficulties still inherent in managing a mobile marketing campaign, and definitely one with a time-sensitive payoff. Kevin Bertram, the CEO of mobile platform Distributive Networks which managed the broadcast, told the Associated Press that routing the SMS messages through the panoply of wireless carriers built delays into the process.

Those bottlenecks were not under the control of either his company or the Obama campaign.

But will the fact that Obama’s campaign couldn’t deliver fully on its promise make a real difference to the many users who requested a text alert? Covey doesn’t think so.

“Marketers should probably view this as a case study that time-sensitive announcements may not be the best way into this medium,” Covey says. “But getting scooped on the announcement does not take away from what Obama’s achieved here: having an intimate personal interaction with 2.9 million of his supporters.”