In an unprecedented attempt to curry favour, new Thai PM Abhisit delivered millions of SMS mobile phone texts messages to the Thai electorate today.
The messages contained a brief statement from PM Abhisit asking for the electorate to support him as he tried to unify the country at this difficult time.
PM Abhisit also asked for people to respond to him with their zipcodes by replying to a 9191 number. This is a premium number which charges 3baht per message - up to 10 times the rate for some phone users.
According to Thai friends who did a quick translation of comments left on Thailand's most popular internet forum, pantip.com, this may have backfired. Some Thais are refusing to send their zipcodes but are rather letting PM Abhisit know what they think of him through a series of written messages. Some ask if he is proud to be PM even though he lost the election while others question his new found political bedfellows - the banned Newin Chidchob, someone who Abhisit considered a political enemy up until a new coalition was formed.
More importantly Thai Politico thinks that the Democrats are showing new levels of stinginess by asking the electorate to pay premium SMS rates when they were prepared to pay 30million baht ++ per coalition MP.
Shame on you PM Abhisit.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
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3 comments:
3 baht is NOT a premium SMS rate but standard rate (1-3 baht according to current promotions)
Anyhow you are on the right track it should be FREE to respond to that SMS instead of letting someone earn millions of baht on this - and then again seems it was mostly send to True move users so only earning thousands not millions :-)
Ok - I was told that people on packages would be paying something like 30 to 50 satang a message - apologies if I got that wrong.
And it is not exactly unprecedented.
Didn't the junta send similar SMS messages after they seized power?
I am cuious whether the Democrat Party entered into a typical commercial transaction to send the messages or if the phone companies were encouraged to cooperate.
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