Text message powered campaigns are getting even more practical. At the Drupal Meet-up in DC last Thursday we ran up a nice $280 bar tab running our first field test of an SMS gateway module/API and a couple last-minute modules we put together to have a website (Drupal powered) talk to cell phones. As folks joined our meetup group at Busboys and Poets, they signed up on the website with their name, mobile number, and email. When they submitted their information, they received an SMS message from the website telling them to speak to the waiter with long hair to get a drink on Development Seed. Too bad Delirium Tremens was on tap – that was the cause of the larger than expected tab.

If we weren’t literally finishing the code on the module while people were ordering their beers, we could have had each person select what they wanted to drink from a menu, and then have the system send us an alert when we hit a price cap.

There are some bars that sell their beer like it’s on the stock market – when a beer is popular its price increases and you can see a live digital chart above the bar for the current price of your beer. With the SMS gateway you could use a Drupal site to send out beer stock prices to sippers in a crowded bar so when Delerium drops back down to something they can afford, they can hit buy…or you could send out real stock prices.

At around 8 pm we used a module to blast out a personalized message to all the attendees saying thanks for coming to the meetup.

Technical notes:We used the SMS gateway API that was developed by David Hamilton to talk to the Clickatell gateway and access their API. We also used some of the mail.module by Nedjo to quickly adapt something to work the SMS Gateway API

With the Clickatell API you can send and receive SMS messages to and from your Drupal site, provided you have a module to do what you want to do.