As a follow-up to our earlier post about Barack Obama's text messaging efforts, we'd like to point you to this story that appeared on the Washington Post's 'The Trail' 2008 election blog a couple of weeks back:

If the campaigns get it right, mobile experts say, next year's election will see "a very big bump" in youth voter participation.

That's a big "if."

So far only Sen. Barack Obama, who's emerging as the pioneering Internet candidate of the campaign (by measure of online fundraising prowess and grassroots popularity on the MySpace-Facebook-YouTube trifecta), is regularly using a text messaging campaign effectively and strategically.

And they've got a study to back up those claims:

A new study by Princeton and University of Michigan found that on the eve of last year's midterm elections, young voters who were sent message reminders were significantly more likely to vote. No surprise there, experts say, since most teenagers live on their cell phones the same way many use SMS programs on Facebook and MySpace. The non-partisan Working Assets Wireless, a mobile company that works with civic organizations, reported that sending a message reminder to vote -- particularly a succinct, to-the-point reminder -- gave a 4 percent boost in the youth voter turnout rates.

Read the entire piece at the Washington Post's website.

Oh, and if you need more proof to how mobile-savvy Barack Obama's campaign is, in addition to  a twitter-based effort, they've even got ringtones.