A NORTH-East company provided mobile phone technology that may have played a major role in the outcome of the US election.

SMS and mobile marketing firm Interlinked Media landed the contract to run the text messaging service for Hillary Clinton’s Democrat nomination campaign.

And although Mrs Clinton missed out on the nomination, the success of the service, which Mrs Clinton made reference to in her first speech on the campaign trail, led Barack Obama to employ text messaging during his successful presidential election campaign.

The Newcastle-based company is hoping the major political parties in Britain will look at using the service, which is also used for marketing by a number of organisations, including leisure groups and English Heritage.

Colin Stewart, UK account director for Interlinked Media, said the contract came about after the company opened an office in Dallas last year and met members of the Clinton campaign team.

He said: “Having seen what we had achieved in the UK, we had some backing because mobile marketing wasn’t widespread in the States at that time, and with our previous track record we were able to negotiate the contract.

“We got a lot of positive feedback and it had an effect on the Obama campaign because they had seen it was so successful and started their own text marketing.”

Mr Stewart believed that mobile phones were a tool that the major political parties in this country had to start using effectively.

He said: “It is recognising it is a major method, not just of communication, but also marketing to the public.

“It is using a device that people have in their pocket 24/7 and always switched on.

“Ninety-five per cent of text messages are read, as opposed to 25 per cent of email, people are always going to read them.”

The service for Mrs Clinton included SMS (text), MMS (picture) and WAP (mobile internet). This allowed her to instantly communicate with the voting public in the US, and poll their opinions on her election policies.

The system developed for Mrs Clinton saw voters texting the word JOIN to 77007.

The information was sent across the US by Interlinked Media supported from its offices on the Newcastle Quayside.

The company found that the time difference worked to its advantage.

As campaigns were sent overnight, the team managed and analysed responses during UK working hours and subsequently provided the Clinton camp with real time reports at the start of their working day.

Chris Newell set up Interlinked Media in 2002, previously trading as TextYou, on completing his degree in computer science at Northumbria University.

He grew the business, which opened an office in London this year, based on providing mobile marketing services for the region’s nightlife scene.

Mr Newell said: “The potential to trade worldwide from Newcastle has always appealed to me. With text messaging in its infancy in the US, our technological expertise is streets ahead of the competition.

“We made a conscious decision to go direct to the US where there is a much larger opportunity to fast-track the growth potential of our business.

There are 236,000,000 cellphone users in the US – a 76 per cent penetration of the whole population.

“Winning the pitch for the Hillary Clinton election campaign was a massive coup for our business.”