Political campaigns in the U.S. have just begun to embrace text messaging and other mobile technologies to communicate with potential voters, but mobile-phone owners should expect more in upcoming elections, a group of political advisers and mobile experts said.

Text-based campaigns have hit the mainstream this year, with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama texting his choice of vice president to supporters, and House of Representatives Republicans sending out text alerts from a darkened House floor when majority Democrats went on recess in August. But there's still more that can be done, said Jed Alpert, CEO of Mobile Commons, a company focused on mobile-based advocacy.

By the 2012 election, mobile-phone users will be able to send donations to political campaigns through text messaging, with the donation charged to their phone bill, Alpert predicted. Charitable organizations are already experimenting with this method of fundraising, and campaigns are able to text voters messages that allow them to connect to call centers that take donations, he said during a forum Tuesday on mobile campaigning sponsored by MobileFuture, a coalition of organizations advocating for the wireless industry.

Text messaging has several advantages over other ways of contacting voters, Alpert said. The cost of sending a text message is a fraction of the cost of phoning a voter or going door-to-door, he said, and the response rates to text messages can be 80 to 90 percent, much higher than the response rate to e-mail messages. In the U.S., mobile-phone users have to sign up to receive legitimate text-message marketing, and mobile-phone users see text messages as more relevant than much of their e-mail, he said.

During the next election cycle, many politicians will also embrace streaming audio and video, with highly targeted messages sent out to mobile-phone users, added Casey O'Shea, national field director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). Politicians will soon begin to integrate mobile marketing with their other media, and the use of mobile applications will expand beyond iPhone users, the panel predicted.

"We're going to micro-targeting [voters] in a way we never thought possible," O'Shea predicted.

Politicians still raise questions about the cost and effectiveness of text messaging, said Katie Harbath, director in the online services division for DCI Group, which helps people run advocacy campaigns, and a former e-campaign adviser to former Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani. But forward-looking politicians will begin to embrace text messaging and other mobile technologies, with text messages or brief videos sent to mobile phones.