1

The Obama Campaign: Politics 4.0

The Revolution Was Televised --

And Microtargeted, Emailed, Blogged, Vlogged, Chatted, Texted,

Tweeted, iPhoned, & Videogamed

Rahaf Farhoush is the new 24. So is Chris Hughes. And when these two new media

pioneers got together, they were a key factor in bringing about change you‟d better believe in:

They did it.

“I was doing research on the Net generation for Don Tapscott‟s upcoming book and

tracked down Chris Hughes, in charge of internal online organizing for the Obama campaign,”

recounted Farhoush. “We hit it off -- we were both 24 and we laughed about being born in same

year. I ended up working on the campaign full time from September of 08 through the election.”

By now, everyone has read of the Obama campaign‟s recipe for

victory -- juggernaut fundraising, consistent and pervasive

messaging, and innovative use of new media platforms and analytical

technologies. Even in the middle of the campaign it was clear that,

like the lyrics of a 1967 hit song by Buffalo Springfield, „something‟s

happening here,‟ a new style of political campaign was emerging.

Within days after the election, dozens of articles appeared, describing

and lauding the many vendors and high-profile wizards who played a

role in it.

It‟s all true – something did happen in the 2008 election cycle and it

<PHOTO CAPTION>: will have a profound effect on political and public affairs campaigns.

Harfoush‟s book, Yes We The presidential effort of Barack Obama raises electioneering to a

Did: An inside look at how higher level that might be called Politics 4.0. The elements of

social media and design Politics 4.0 are:

built the Obama brand,” -- Integrated communications strategy

will be published in May, -- Consistent high-level messaging

2009. Photo source: http://www -- Predictive analytics

rahafharfoush.com, used with -- Technological support permission. <PHOTO CAPTION>

<TABLE, about here> Innovations in Communication Technology in Political Campaigns

Political Campaign 1.0 – Oral

Communication

Speeches, word-of-mouth

Political Campaign 2.0 – Mass Media

2.0.1 – Mass Media (Print)

Widely circulated newspapers

2.0.2 – Mass Media (Radio)

Use of radio to reach public

1833: The New York Sun, the nation‟s first “penny

press.”

1920: KDKA – first broadcast of Pres. election returns

1924: Coolidge/Davis Pres. race, “the Radio Election” 1

2

2.0.3 – Mass Media (Television)

Use of television to reach public

1952: Eisenhower presidential campaigns airs first

political TV commercial

Political Campaign 3.0 – Mass Media

+ Direct Media + Word of Mouth

2004: Bush presidential campaign uses microtargeting

to reach voters via phone banks, email, newsletters, and

church-based word of mouth

Political Campaign 4.0 – Integrated

communications

Mass Media (Print/Radio/TV)

Social Media (Social

networks, blogs, Twitter,

videogames)

Personal Media (mobile

phones, pagers, PDAs)

Direct Media (direct mail,

email)

2008: Obama presidential campaign uses integrated

communications strategy, predictive analytics, and

state-of-the-art technology to support them

Can you come up with the Jeopardy question that encapsulates integrated

communications and predictive analytics in the next :30 seconds? If not, better read on because

without understanding what they mean, even if you are the most skilled practitioner of Politics

3.0, your next campaign could suffer the same fate as McCain‟s ‟08 campaign. Here‟s how

Farhoush puts it:

“The Obama campaign wasn‟t a win for technology; it was a win for strategy. It was a

win for the power of a strategic vision, executed in an integrated media campaign. It was strong

messaging and strong branding, executed across different channels. People went on Facebook,

MySpace, and other social networks and got the same brand as people who received it on TV and

radio -- all the same brand. It was so powerful because it was consistent across all the media

consumer touch points,” she explained.

The formal underpinning of contemporary persuasive campaigns is a discipline called

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC). IMC originated at Northwestern University in

1991 under the joint imprimatur of Don Schultz, Dick Christian, Ted Spiegel, and Stan

Tannenbaum, often called the founding fathers of IMC. They re-designed a master‟s degree in

marketing to include a dynamic mix of marketing, public relations, and advertising.

A definition of IMC, coined by marketing guru Esther Thorson, is “the strategic

coordination of multiple communication voices with its aim to optimize the impact of a

persuasive communication on both consumer and non-consumer audiences by coordinating such

elements of the marketing mix as advertising, public relations, promotions, direct marketing, and

package design.” That mouthful boils down to this: A single messaging purpose prepared in

multiple voices to reach multiple target audience groups, across multiple communication

channels.

IMC is the framework through which communication efforts can plan, implement,

evaluate, and track complex communication programs across multiple voter segments, content

3

types, and media platforms. The growth of Internet use and the emergence of additional

communication channels has propelled IMC to the forefront of marketing efforts for several

reasons.

Defining audience/consumer/voter segments is now possible through a branch of data

mining called predictive analytics. And composing and tracking the specialized messaging to

reach each segment has become a complex activity in its own right. Yet the easy access of each

group to messages that may be directed to other segments poses a threat and it forces campaigns

to make sure their messages are, at minimum, not inconsistent. In other words, messages do not

have to be the same or even similar – but they must have some level of consistency. Viral video

is an even greater push towards consistency, as friendly George Allen found out the hard way

when his moment of meanness on showed up as a Youtube video.

Using media effectively today requires a more detailed understanding of how people

consume media than ever before. It‟s not enough to know the alphabet soup of TVHHs, GRPs,

and TRPs of traditional buying. In that old world, 97% of people watched TV and demographics

ruled. Today, voter and consumer segments are increasingly defined as much by their personal

preferences for receiving messages as by demographic, psychographic, or lifestyle variables.

This means that people who use television or read a newspaper daily may not use the Internet or

receive SMS text at all; those who use Twitter may not watch television; and those who play

videogames may not listen to the radio or read non-game blogs and magazines. And any of them

can be of any age: Did you know that 45% of people between 70 and 75 now use the Internet?

Today‟s media landscape is an ever-changing and much larger landscape than in the past.

In other words, it‟s not just different – it‟s bigger. In the last decade, two ubiquitous new media

types have emerged, mobile phones and social media, such as blogs and social networks.

Moreover, old media don‟t die, they are just re-purposed.

Indeed, using the media to promote political candidates and causes is nothing new. From

the early 1700s, available popular print media and widespread literacy became an increasingly

powerful social and political force through the end of the 19th

century. Electronic mass media in

the form of radio came to the fore in 1924 and was the strongest media influence until television

reigned from the early 1950s to the present. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, direct mail

assumed a special importance in politics, particularly in turning out the base. By the mid-1990s,

email emerged as a relatively inexpensive alternative direct medium to reach individually

addressable voters. And at the end of the 1990s to the present, social media, (blogs, social

networks, wikis, video sites) and personal media (mobile phones, PDAs, pagers) are new,

effective influence mechanisms for communicating with voters.

Did the Obama campaign consciously employ IMC? Nobody knows; if they do, they‟re

not talking. Certainly no one has cited explicitly the books or the professors. But remember that

these IMC founding fathers created the first program at Northwestern – in Chicago. Moreover,

Julius Genachowski, who was a key advisor to President-elect Obama during the campaign and

is now a member of the transition team, served as the Chief Business Officer for InterActive

Corp. (IAC). IAC specializes in developing advertising campaigns that integrate a wide array of

new media media and channels. So while Genachowski may not have written the playbook

4

himself, he certainly knows the people who did, as well as the brains behind many of the most

ambitious implementations of IMC.

If you were a 24-year old political operative in the Obama campaign like Rahaf

Farboush, you‟d know all about IMC. “The innovation started from strategy, planning, and

foresight. That is what made it successful. It was far more strategic than tactical. The money

helped, but a lot of the push from the campaign through social media came in the beginning

when Obama was the underdog, before we had the big machine. It‟s not about budget – it‟s about

an intense and focused effort,” she explained.

Data in the Driver’s Seat

How the Obama Campaign Counted Where It Counted

Think of it as the t-shirt everyone in the Obama campaign could have worn after the

election: In the new politics, if you don‟t count…you don‟t count. Research is fundamental to

integrated communication efforts, such as those executed by the Barack Obama presidential

campaign. That‟s nothing new. After all, marketing and its offspring, the political campaign,

have long conducted research to learn about consumers and voters to shape messages and test

prepared messages. Typically, putting together a media plan involved estimating how many

people a given effort would reach and how often it would reach them, using some particular

medium or mix of media.

However, in the last decade, there have been significant advances in collecting data about

voters, mining that data for specific information, and most recently, combining it to compile

detailed portraits of segments and individuals. Collectively, these techniques are called micro-

targeting. The political pioneer of micro-targeting was Karl Rove in the Bush ‟04 campaign. As

one blogger put it: “You or I might speak of the Joneses at No. 42. Rove is more likely to refer to

the Irish/Jordanian, Princeton/Oxford, pro-choice, World Bank-economist couple with the

vacation home in the Shenandoahs, where they keep their battered second Volvo, the one with

the Rehoboth Beach parking decal."2

Contemporary micro-targeting works by mining rich seams of multiple data sets for

information and then recombining the results to build detailed portraits of voter segments or

specific individuals. For instance, suppose a volunteer in the Obama campaign was tasked to

recruit more volunteers from area code 92103 via email to be part of the Mamas for Obama

phone banking team. A feature of the pitch would be to organize babysitting for everyone in a

volunteer‟s family room, while all the mothers make calls on their cell phones in the living room.

A query that combined data from the following data sets would provide a good list of

women 18-45 with one or more children under 18, who tend to vote Democratic, and have

donated to Democratic campaigns:

1. Obama and local Democratic Party donors – campaign website, DNC data, and

Synetech data

2. U.S. Government Census data

3. State of California Precinct-level voting records

4. Credit card data – via DNC

5

5. Purchased email lists

Possible? Definitely. Those micro-targeted emails can be squirting through the intertubes

the next day.

But there‟s a catch to all this wizardry. It‟s all about the past. The past may be prelude to

the future – but it isn‟t the future yet. And it is hard to know precisely which piece of the past is

indeed the prelude.

To learn about the future, campaigns can always hire a psychic. Or they can use data to

make educated, evidence-driven predictions, using a part-science, part-art practice called

“predictive analytics.” Of course, there‟s a catch. The only really gather data fresh enough to be

useful in predictive analytics is to integrate the hardware, software, and databases to consolidate

and analyze an immense amount of raw data.

The design culture of the computer industry has made integration one of the toughest

challenges in IT (information technology) architecture and design. Yet all the best hardware and

software might as well sit in their boxes if they aren‟t a working coalition of processes. Like

politics itself, integration requires recognizing establishing a shared definition of the situation,

speaking a common language, and setting into motion a cascade of coordinated processes that

result in concerted action.

And it must all begin with people who have a vision of how the pieces fit together.

Fortunately for the Obama campaign, they could draw on a talented and experienced team, some

of whom had been working to crack the code for nearly a decade: Chief Technology Officer

Michael Slaby, New Media Director Joe Rospars, and staffers Luke Peterson, Dan Langer, Chris

Wegrzyn, and Uday Sreekanth. These people came together at the right time to build on the

analysis platform the Democrats had been developing through multiple election cycles.

Integration: Making Sense of Data Soup

The vision of building integrated communication programs came from the nonprofit

world. MoveOn.org understood the potential of the viral properties of Internet communication

and grew a base of millions of people. But even before that, Common Cause pioneered these

ideas, which were brought to the Dean campaign partly through the nonprofit‟s former

webmaster Nicco Mele. In a sense, the Dean campaign was the beta project for the Obama web

operation. In addition to Mele, Dean national software engineer Clay Johnson went on to co-

found Blue State Digital, the company that built and managed the Obama Web programs and

those of many other progressive candidates and causes.

When Howard Dean became head of the Democratic National Committee, he brought an

understanding of how technology can support and grow political campaigns with him.

Technology Director Ben Self, Political Director Dave Boundy, Deputy Political Director Keith

Goodman, and Executive Director Tom McMahon implemented an impressive program of

aligning the DNC with state-of-the-art political technologies. They hooked up with Voter

Activation Network (VAN), a Boston-based private company that collects data from local

campaigns and maintains a national database of Democratic voters. The DNC makes that data

6

available to all state parties and national campaigns in the form of VoteBuilder, a system they

use both to download data for campaigns and to upload the new data they gather as they conduct

the campaign. As a direct result of these pioneer campaign technology creators and adopters, the

Democratic presidential nominee entered the scene with much of the groundwork completed and

in place.

“Speed, automation, and disintermediation are really the story of how you can

successfully fundraise, schedule, and campaign today,” said Stuart Trevelyan, president of NGP

Software. NGP provided software and services to more than 1,000 campaigns, working with

Democrats and their allies.

“Disintermediation means that people now self-organize without the mediation of a

campaign staff. The voters stopped being passive consumers of TV ads and started being

participants at an unprecedented level,” explained Trevelyan.

Social Networks: An Army of Online Pitchforks

“In previous campaigns, the average voter wasn‟t interacting with significant numbers of

people. Now there are applications like the Obama campaign‟s Neighbor-to-Neighbor program,

where people identified individuals in their social networks and had conversations with them.

Persuasion studies show that face-to-face interaction is dramatically more effective than other

techniques – and technology plays a key role in identifying who could talk to who,” noted

Trevalyan.

The infrastructure that enables self-organization is social networks. Some social

networking software is open and public, like MyBarackObama.com, Facebook, MySpace, and

Twitter. Other SN software is private, like Central Desktop. But social networking, public and

private, is not the whole answer to effective use of millions of online volunteers. The Obama was

able to capture the information that all those self-organized voters provided and feed it into the

Netezza monster. They could then use that data to expand their reach to as yet-untapped voter

groups.

The technologists integrated the data collection and analysis platform so that many of the

processes could be automated. In turn, automation allowed the campaign decision-makers to

obtain usable information in near-real time. So while the technology platform didn‟t run the

campaign, it did provide a wealth of specific information that the staff could act on it with

unprecedented speed and specificity.

Scientific Soothsaying: Obama’s secret weapon and predictive analytics

Even when the Obama campaign empowered people who understood how the pieces fit

together to start work, the inherent technical problems of actually integrating the hardware and

software remained. Kevin Malover, the campaign‟s Chief Technology Officer had the day-to-day

task of making sure it happened. The job is easier since the use of XML, a system for describing

and preparing data for transport and storage, making it possible for different applications import,

process, and exchange data.

7

By the end of the campaign, the sheer scale and innovation of the campaign became clear

– the Obama people had left everyone gobsmacked by their high-powered use of social science

and the-next-big-thing tech. The campaign had cooked together detailed information from many

sources -- the DNC‟s VAN, their own web operations, Catalist, the U.S. census, and credit

reporting agencies – resulting in a complex data stew. Like all great recipes, there was an

essential ingredient that pulled all the flavors together into a fulsome bouquet. For the Obama

campaign, it was Netezza (pronounced Net-eé-za), a specialized computer platform and data

warehouse – a digital slice-and-dicer with information superhero powers.

And although Netezza is indeed bigger, faster, and better than other systems, it also

performs on the bleeding edge of extracting actionable knowledge out of a tsunami of

transactional data. Transactional data describes who did what, where, and when. A good example

would be tracking orders from a huge inventory. Most political campaigns use transaction

processing on their data and make decisions based on that level of information.

However, no matter how good it is or how quickly it is carried out, transactional analysis

describes the past very well, but says little about the future. In the last decade, marketers have

taken the analysis of data to a whole new level to help them anticipate the future direction of

consumers – and now voters. This new way of looking at data is called “predictive analytics.”

Predictive analytics is the basis for many building an integrated communication program

and, in the form of Integrated Marketing Communication, it helps organizations build

relationships with their constituencies and consumers. The principle behind it is that, if analysts

know data 1, 2, 3, and 4 about a person, they can predict data 5 at some specified level of

confidence. The trick is finding which data are 1, 2, and 3, and 4 that actually predict data 5.

“You have to crunch vast amounts of data, probably from several transactional databases,

to find predictive variables, to spot a trend. It really is like finding a needle in a haystack, and it

is much easier said than done,” said an individual involved in building the predictive analytics

system for the Obama campaign who requested anonymity.

Netezza is the premier system to carry out predictive analytics tasks, combining both

hardware and software components, all patented. Its data warehouse holds multiple huge

databases. The system uses massively parallel processing at the silicon level to bring in the data

as well as to analyze it. And the list of organizations that use Netezza is itself informative:

Google, Wal-Mart, and many telephone companies that now predict traffic and conduct on-the-

fly billing analysis. Fannie Mae has recently contracted for a Netezza system to model good and

bad loans and to predict which ones will become problematic in the future.

The Obama campaign‟s use of Netezza carries some significance. The system builder

opined: “It is their secret weapon. And it tells me that whoever is running the Obama campaign

knew a lot because it‟s the Ferrari, the connoisseur‟s box. It has many advantages over its

competitors because you can plug in and get stuff out of it within two to three weeks, instead of

five to six months. It crunches mountains of data to extract knowledge,”

8

The Big So-What

Stop the presses. Someone won the 2008 presidential election; someone lost. The candidate

who won ran a better campaign. There‟s nothing new here. Except that there is. The Obama

campaign operated at an entirely different level than any previous campaign has ever been

conducted. Perhaps an envious opponent sums it up best.

“Obama never hit home runs. They didn‟t walk out to home plate and swing for the fences

every day. They did it by hitting singles and doubles. That is an abstract analogy but it is the

truth: putting people in place who understand the Net in the campaign at an early stage, making

the online operation an early budget priority and not holding money for a media spending buy,

using the Internet as a communicative channel, not just fundraising, consistent good emails,

sending emails early. They built communities within communities, empowering others to take up

the cause. It‟s powerful,” said David All, founder of a conservative Web agency, the David All

Group.

The lessons are simple. The first step is to execute the classic moves well. Vijay

Ravindran, Chief Technology Officer of Catalist, which developed a likely voter model for the

Obama staff, states the basics clearly: “Political campaigns require a very practical, focused

approach. Practitioners are working in campaign time. They need information quickly. The key

to winning is to make outreach programs more efficient by talking to more people and leaving

out the people you shouldn‟t talk to. And when you do talk, you talk about the right issues in the

right way.”

However, just because the lessons are simple doesn‟t mean they are always easy. In today‟s

fast-moving digital environment, it is critical to innovate. Isaac Garcia, co-founder and CEO of

Central Desktop software watched how the Obama campaign used the online software:

“They used Central Desktop in a unique way, actually. They used it as a way of organizing

their internal management teams in California and Texas. But they also used it externally to

organize precinct captains and for them to organize their volunteer teams. They had thousands of

people using it, coming into a workspace, making changes and edits, adding new information,

scripts of what to say, how to organize your neighborhood, where the latest meetings were and

when they were scheduled. That was the real stretch and it complemented the

www.mybarackobama.com website in many ways,” he said.

Stuart Trevelyan of NGP Software thinks that the innovation curve in politics is just

starting. “It still feels to me like we are in the first inning in that there has been a lot of

replacement of existing campaign tactics. People went from index cards to a relational database

and obviously the Internet has replaced TV and direct mail channels. But I think there are

incredible innovations in politics to involve people in a way they haven‟t been previously. One

example is the incoming Obama adminstration‟s openness about collecting ideas from lots of

people around the country using www.change.gov. But on the campaign side, there is a lot of

innovation that still has yet to be done,” he said.

David All is waiting for Republicans to “get it.”

9

“They still don‟t fully grasp what Obama did. In 2004, Howard Dean proved the

importance of the Net and Democrats widely accepted it. What the Republican Party is lacking is

that Howard Dean moment, that candidate who has proven the Net to be a value add to the

campaign. But Obama‟s success could be that moment for the Republicans,” he hopes.

Just One More Thing

The use of predictive analytics and the way the Obama campaign empowered supporters to

self-organize underlines the changes in the communication environment for all messaging. Yet

the thinking of many practitioners still follows a model of mass media that is based on over-the-

air broadcasting developed by Wilbur Schramm in the 1950s.

But viral marketing and campaigning now tell a different story. In addition to the classic

feedback loop, we must add a feedforward loop that describes how broadcast messages diffuse

through the population via interpersonal networks. The Schramm model anticipates this turn of

events, but the Obama campaign vividly illustrates that that model does not go far enough.

10

This change of model places communication into a more widespread and well-understood

framework that will help campaigners execute communications programs more effectively, the

Theory of Diffusion of Innovation. It has been used for more than 30 years by a host of

marketers to introduce new products and to segment users, based on their adoption of an

innovation. It makes available thousands of studies that can introduce a new sophistication in

messaging strategies, particularly when combined with the broad reach of Integrated Marketing

Communication and the anticipatory thrust of predictive analytics.

However, theories and technologies only take a campaign so far. There is always the

ground truth of the ideas and the candidate, as expressed by Larry Hayes of Synetech, whose

company provided accounting and reporting support for the Obama fundraising effort:

“Obama would have done well anywhere, at any time. He was just a hot, hot, hot

candidate at a time when nobody was. Nobody was this charismatic, this perfect as a candidate.

He is smart, he is reasonable, he knows how to talk to educated people, and he is inspirational.”

1 Weeks, Lewis E. The Radio Election of 1924. Journal of Broadcasting Summer, 1964: 233-243.

2 http://www.crikey.com.au/Politics/20070814-Advice-from-the-architect-Karl-Roves-top-ten-tips-for-winning-an-

election.html

__________________________________________________________________________________________

11

WH WAS WH

Mainstream Media: TV, Radio, Newspaper Spending on traditional media in the ‟08 election cycle was high and TNS Media Intelligence

tracks political advertising spending. However, this article covers only new media initiatives.

Website: The campaign website was my.barackobama.com, which was designed and maintained by

campaign staff. Project leads were Scott Thomas (of SimpleScott) and the campaign‟s Creative

Director and John Slabyk, Art Director on the site. Sol Sender of Sender LLC designed the

Obama logo. Walker Hamilton performed general maintenance, content administration, and

feature planning. Joe Rospars was a major player in new media activities, managing a staff

reported to vary between 13 and 30 people at various times. He was an idea sparkplug, managing

editorial efforts and coordinating the new media ad buys. An analytical team monitored and

reported site activity, monitored the performance of email solicitations, and tracked the ability of

ads to draw traffic to the site. MySQL software from Sun allowed the team to make gather data

about the site through structured.

Online Advertising: Data from Nielsen Online/AdRelevance reports that the Obama campaign had 416.7 million

image ad impressions, compared to 16.5 million such impressions for the McCain campaign.

According to ClickZ, Obama spent about $8 million on online advertising. The campaign

customized ad creative to residents in different states. During the campaign, ads were tailored to

issues prominent in the target states; during the general election, the campaign urged people to

register and vote.

Paid Search: According to data from Nielsen/AdRelevance, the McCain campaign outspent Obama on the

paid search category. For example, in May, 2008, McCain spent $5.4 million; Obama spent $1.8

million.

Online fundraising: The Obama campaign raised about $500 through social networking alone. Fundraising by

outside groups and grassroots efforts, much of which was accomplished online, complicates the

definition of what constitutes this category. During the long election cycle, the lines between the

Obama campaign staff, communications, and the new media group blurred as the campaign

progressed and heated up. It is probably safe to assume that most of the online staffers

participated in fundraising efforts. Outside vendors included: Blue State Digital, particularly the

BSD tools suite, NGP Software, and Brightcove.

Email: After the election, the Washington Post reported that the Obama campaign collected more than

13 million addresses and sent out more than 1 billion emails, composed of more than 7,000

messages. The content was targeted, with specific groups receiving tailored messages and

solicitations. Email communications were tagged with metada to provide contextual information

about the purpose of the email and the nature of the response. The campaign tracked the time

12

recipients opened emails and, if they opened them at a particular time, they would schedule the

messages to be sent out at that time of the day.

Gray Brooks was the head of email correspondence for the campaign that, at least initially, used

SproutIt Mailroom software to manage email.

Online Answer Center: The campaign outsourced management of an integrated customer relationship management

(CRM) answer center that reportedly handled 2 million visitors and queries between March of

2007 and April of 2008, from both online and telephone users. Data from the campaign provided

center workers with context on callers, including a history of previous calls, background on the

nature of the call (question, volunteer signup, etc.) to focus the response. The vendor was

RightNow and Colin Jones was the executive managing the Obama account.

Volunteer Coordination: In Texas and California, where the sheer size of the states requires exceptional efforts to

coordinate the campaign effort, the social technology platform used Central Desktop. The

Obama Campaign team used Central Desktop along with other technology tools to manage the

process of hiring, managing and sharing critical information with thousands of precinct captain

volunteers hired to drive their neighbors to the polls. Obama neighborhood teams who contacted

voters included a “data” member, responsible for uploading all contact information to the central

database. Central Desktop had both a public-facing functionality and private-facing functionality.

Campaign staff and volunteers accessed the private-facing interface.

The public accessed the public-facing interface through their login to

www.my.barackobama.com website. Central Desktop provided information to the public about

local events, locations, deadlines, and opportunities to volunteer. Patrick DeTemple was Obama

campaign‟s Data & Systems Manager. Central Desktop CEO Isaac Garcia considered the public-

facing use of the software an unexpected innovation on the part of the campaign.

Wiki Internal Campaign Coordination: Internally, the staff used their access to the private-facing Central Desktop wiki interface to

discuss rapid response and messaging issues. The campaign also used wiki software Basecamp to

coordinate the efforts of distributed IT staff in the building of www.barackobama.com.

Social Networks: Facebook was the tent pole of the social networking effort, effectively making every visitor a

fundraiser/bundler and event planner for the campaign. By election day, the Obama campaign

had 2.4 million FB supporters. Data from Forrester Research (taken from Google Analytics,

Crazy Egg, and DoubleClick) indicates that the campaign had more than 800,000 friends on

MySpace, 112,000 followers on Twitter, 500+ LinkedIn connections, and 14,500 Meetup

members. The campaign had pages on BlackPlanet, AsianAve, MiGente, Eons , Students for

Obama, and probably others as well. Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook, headed the overall

social network strategy for the campaign.

13

Campaign Social Network: Site – my.barackobama.com: At its high point, MyBO had 2 million active users, more than

100,000 profiles, 35,000 affinity groups, and was the coordination point for 200,000 events.

About 70,000 people raised $30 million using MyBO. And in the last four days of the campaign,

users made 3 million telephone calls as part of the get-out-the-vote effort.

Then-Senator Barack Obama retained Blue State Digital (BSD) to build and manage the online

fundraising, constituency-building, issue advocacy, and peer-to-peer online networking aspects

of his 2008 Presidential primary campaign. TextPattern software handled the content

management for the site. Comodo provided security and trust assurance services.

Using the BSD management dashboard and the BSD Toolset software, authorized staff could

control the look and feel of the pages, create new fundraising and action initiatives, set up email

and fundraising campaigns, and manage community content and blog pages. Some of the

programs included tell-a-friend, peer-to-peer fundraising, event planning and coordination,

messaging, and community rating of content. Staff could access continuously-updated site

performance statistics and monitor such activities as visitor activities, gauge volunteer and donor

commitment through participation on the site. MyBO was also the collection point for user-

provided data, such as voting habits, donation history, and issue salience. Users could also

customize the site by setting preferences. And they could establish their own fundraisers,

meetings, and events.

Online voter registration: Part of the my.barackobama.com website, my.barackobama.com/voteforchange, the Vote for

Change initiative provided a portal for voters to get help with voter registration, find vote

information, request absentee ballots and find polling locations.

Viral Video: The most important use of viral video was on www.youtube.com, where there were 1800 video

uploads by supporters. The campaign video channel had 115,000 followers and nearly 20 million

video views. On Ustream, Obama video garnered 809,000 views.

The most popular viral videos were not produced by the campaign at all. Will.i.am created “Yes

We Can,” and Youtube shows that the video has been viewed 14 million times there. In addition,

the video is posted on many different sites, including AOL. In addition, the link to a video

produced by MoveOn.org generated 15 million emails. The video super read: “Obama loses

election by 1 vote.” At several places through the video, the visual included the person‟s name

provided by the forwarder. An example is a sign outside a church, “God loves everyone. Except

PROVIDED NAME. Finally, a spoof video of Tom Brokaw describing a McCain victory

pointed visitors to www.voteforchange.com. It was an immediate hit before being pulled by

NBC for copyright violation.

Mobama: Scott Goodstein headed up the overall mobile effort, including mobile web site, text messaging,

iPhone applications and iPhone GPS.

14

Mobile web site: Users clicked to www.obamamobile.mobi in order to subscribe to mobile services, including text

messaging. The site incorporated solicitations to “tell a friend,” by sending visitors to a page

where they could text their friends. It also provided mobile-sized messages about the candidate,

news, mobile phone wallpapers and ringtones so that anyone who called the user would hear

Obama‟s voice answering the phone. It also gathered information through a mobile poll.

Text Messaging: Before the election was over, the Obama campaign collected 2.9 million text message addresses.

The SMS text address for the Obama campaign was 62262 (OBAMA). To activate the service,

users sent the message GO to that address and then received news, ads, early announcements,

and campaign-related messages such as “vote early.” The campaign also utilized text messages

to encourage users to forward the text to their friends to grow the network. In some rallies, the

campaign asked attendees to pull out their cell phones, to text a specific code to 62262, which

would supply the campaign with a date of signup, location, and mobile phone number. In to

support efforts in battleground states, text messages were geo-targeted by zip code to Iowa,

Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina, Florida, Montana, and Wisconsin.

In some battleground states, the text message vendors were Quattro Wireless, providing the

servers and mobile network through Sprint Boost. The “vote early” campaign used the ChaCha

interface and was coordinated with Rock the Vote (RTV, www.rockthevote.org). By sending a

text message to RTV, a ChaCha live person would send information about how to register and

candidates‟ platforms and voting records.

Another major initiative was the offer to send news of the selection of the vice president on the

ticket, the Biden announcement text messaging was handled by aggregator SinglePoint,

partnering with Distributive Networks to send out the text messages.

iPhone: The iPhone application was one of the Top Ten free downloads on iTunes almost as soon as it

was launched. iPhone users could browse images, videos, and campaign information. The

campaign tapped people in the social network of supporters who lived in battleground states by

scanning the personal phone book and putting them in an “Obama contact list,” urging the user

to phone those people to support Obama. The iPhone GPS provided directions to rallies,

campaign offices, and volunteer meetups.

Online Video Game Advertising: The campaign purchased ads inside of Electronic Arts‟ top nine games for Xbox 360 Live,

running from October 6 until the day before the election, November 3. Visible to players in 10

states, they received messages featuring Obama urging them to vote. The ads appeared in game-

appropriate venues, actually integrated into the game so that drivers saw billboards, contestants

saw stadium posters, and so forth.

Fun: Go to www.logobama.com and create your personalized version of the Obama campaign logo –

your photo goes in place of the sun.

15

____________________________________________________________________________

How local campaigns can harness the power of new media

“I don‟t have a billion dollars in my campaign war chest!” you say. Fortunately, you

won‟t need it to implement Politics 4.0. New media efforts have associated costs, but they are

not necessarily cash intensive – the costs won‟t even approach those of traditional media. They

are, however, labor intensive. So you might need to re-think, re-design, and re-tool some parts of

the venerable campaign machinery that has served so well in the past.

The next sections serve as hands-on guides to integrating the new elements of new media

politicking into traditional campaign structures and processes. Each part covers a specific area or

cluster of activities that a campaign staff can tailor to suit local conditions and needs. Please note

that blue or red outlined boxes indicate a new structure or function; boxes outlined in black

signify little or no change.

16

New Media Mindset

The first steps towards implementing new media in a campaign begin with the strategic

staff. The structural changes are small, but the conceptual changes require some adaptation on

the part of experienced practitioners.

New media are…well, new – campaigns have to think about them as something different

from traditional media. They are interactive, with voters sending as well as receiving

communications, so there have to be methods of handling incoming as well as outgoing

messages. And there are lots of messages, because new media are multi-point to multi-point

(everybody talking to everybody), instead of point-to-multipoint like broadcast and other

traditional mass media.

Nor do new media have the same effects as traditional media, which amplify messages in

a short period of time. In the article on the Obama campaign, Republican David All noted that

the Obama staff didn‟t try to hit home runs every day. Instead, they concentrated on making base

hits. This is an important point: New media may not generate the stunning turning point

moments in the campaign. But they will help accumulate consistent gains that add up over time.

And they will bounce stories to the mass media that do create turning points – think George

Allen‟s 2006 “macaca moment.”

Campaigns also have to consider how they exercise control. Message discipline

contributed to the Obama campaign‟s ability to encourage participation by followers. Although

they issued day-to-day messages that reflected the news of the moment, they kept the same over-

arching umbrella message throughout the entire campaign, “Change you can believe in.” The

consistency allowed followers to write about the candidate‟s positions and to speculate about

unannounced positions, in their own words, based on their own experiences. It fostered vibrant

discussions on political blog sites that did not step on or contradict campaign messaging.

The emergence of new media gives supporters the means to participate actively. And they

just don‟t communicate the way they used to, through polite phone calls and individual emails.

It‟s not just an age thing – there are plenty of Boomers who use email, have Facebook pages,

write on blogs, and depend on text messaging. Indeed, the more politically active a voter is, the

more likely they are to communicate in these new ways.

This communicational free-for-all challenges campaign control. Adherents, as well as the

followers of opponents, are likely to create unintended, even unwanted, messages or engage in

17

questionable activities. While such occurrences are not new, the enlarged scale of participation

means that staff needs to have plans in place to respond quickly and decisively to them.

Forrester‟s 2nd

quarter 2007 research on adults‟ use of social technologies shows that

Democrats currently enjoy a 2 percent to 10 percent advantage in all the categories of users.

However, it is unlikely that this gap will persist: The new media are handy for everyone,

regardless of political affiliation. For example, Forrester reported that in the Republican primary,

Romney supporters were the most wired, with about 42 percent of them classified as “inactives.”

On the Democratic side, Clinton supporters were the least wired, composed of about 43 percent

inactive.

To accommodate the changes in messaging and communication, campaigns will need to

add a New Media Director to the strategic staff to manage the technology and the message load -

- hardware and software, onsite and online. An essential responsibility of the New Media

Director is to facilitate the alignment of goals with tasks and technologies. This position is not

filled by a technician; rather, it requires someone with a broad understanding of how to use new

media channels to connect, coordinate, and communicate. Hiring a 25-year old as Media Director

will not ensure that the person can do the job. Again, age is a less relevant factor than is

popularly assumed, but recent experience using these channels and the ability to adapt quickly to

new opportunities are key.

Another change campaigns might consider is generating more of their own data and using

it to track and monitor progress. Candidates have long responded to feedback in the form of

survey research, which has provided reliable but expensive indicators. Now, new media turn the

trickle of poll data into an informational tsunami.

18

In addition to traditional sources of census, party-gathered, and campaign-generated data,

systems must take in data from the online website, social network site, purchased commercial

data, and campaign-generated data from voter registration and canvassing efforts. These data are

valuable, but aggregating, analyzing, and interpreting them is a challenge that will probably

require the services of outside experts. The continuous transformation of data into information

into actionable knowledge is feedback the strategic staff needs to guide day-to-day decision-

making, an adaptive mechanism to make those daily base hits, doubles, and triples possible.

New Media Machine

The operational staff is the humming engine of the campaign. As political efforts

incorporate new media, they will make key changes, including adding an Online Coordinator and

expanding the role of the Volunteer Coordinator.

A good example of the addition of an Online Coordinator was the spontaneous

attachment of Lowell Feld to the Jim Webb (D-VA) Senatorial campaign of 2006. As described

in his 2008 Praeger book, Netroots Rising,” Feld had founded the Virginia Democratic-oriented

blog site in 2005, www.raisingkaine.com to organize opposition to the Republican victory in

2004 and to help elect Tim Kaine as Virginia governor. By 2006, Feld was the glue holding

together a phalanx of activists to draft Jim Webb to run against the state‟s sitting senator, George

“Felix” Allen. After the primary, Feld used the pioneering volunteer-oriented site to allow Webb

supporters to meet, organize, and coordinate.

In his last message before shutting down the Raising Kaine blog site, Feld offers hard-

won knowledge to would-be blog builders:

You need to have something to say. If not, why bother blogging?

You need to express yourself coherently at the minimum, eloquently if possible.

Work at this, day in and day out, get out and cover events, do original reporting,

dig for information.

Be willing to fight for what you believe in and to take on powerful people when

they're wrong. .. even when they are in your own party.)

Feld writes: “Can blogs make a difference? Perhaps not blogs per se, standing on their own. However, combined with the efforts of talented grassroots activists, they absolutely can make a difference. I'm thinking first and foremost of the Webb campaign, in which a 10,000-strong "ragtag army" arose and helped defeat the seemingly invincible George Allen. Could that "ragtag army" have arisen without blogs like this one? Possibly, but it's hard to see how we would have persuaded Webb to run without the "draft," and how that "draft" - which began right here on this blog - could have succeeded if it hadn't moved at the lightning speeds permitted by this amazing invention known as the internet(s). :) Don't believe me? I have just three words for you: President Barack Obama.”

19

The Volunteer Coordinator is a familiar job but in Politics 4.0 efforts it takes on new

significance and duties. In these campaigns, the highest-level volunteers become part of the

operational staff, executing many of the responsibilities and activities that, in most campaigns,

are performed by paid staff. The VC champions volunteer training, sets recruitment policies and

rules, supervises volunteers, and establishes a good working environment for them.

The slogan that guided the Obama volunteer effort was: “Respect. Empower. Include.” It

was a powerful philosophy that motivated and inspired volunteers. Respect for volunteers meant

assigning them meaningful, rewarding tasks, not just the drudge work. Empower meant

encouraging “bottom up” innovation as well as “top down” control. Include was tied to a theme

of the Power of Five, which asked each volunteer to recruit five other volunteers.

Obama volunteers organized events and ran them, with online assists such as invitation

utilities and lists of the email addresses and phone numbers of local supporters. “We are the

change we are waiting for” is variation of the empowerment theme. The extent to which this

philosophy took hold is illustrated by an anecdote from a local blog on November 4, 2008:

“We showed up at 6:15 this morning to our polling location in Westport. There

were about 150 people in line. The line didn't move for 15 minutes before a girl in

a lime green shirt with the Obama logo in white that said "voting rights advocate" told us

that the election representatives inside had the wrong books. She told us that as long as

we had our voter ID#s we would be able to vote. As soon as she said that, people were

sharing their phones and Blackberries to either call the election board or get on their

website to get their numbers. As we got more organized, the line started moving.”

Finally, Obama‟s campaign made a long-term effort to convert volunteer donors of

money into volunteer donors of time and vice versa. They welcomed people who gave small

amounts of either – contributions of $5.00 or half an hour were received warmly. For example, a

post on www.mybarackobama.com (the campaign social network site) asked for volunteers on

election day: “If you have even thirty minutes to spare in the next three hours, we can use your

help. Simply select the state you want to call from the map below, and we'll provide you with an

easy to use script and a targeted list of voters to call. The largest voter contact operation ever

attempted is underway right now. This is your chance to be part of it.”

New Media Multitasking

20

If new media doesn‟t change the structure of campaigns a great deal, the same cannot be

said for processes. These additional processes are added on top of traditional activities and

processes, so they represent a significantly greater burden of work to the campaign. As an

example, the increased volume of data and messages will be enormous. Handled properly, so

will the flow of contributions.

The Care and Feeding of Volunteers: There is only one way to handle all the new tasks

– volunteers. The Volunteer and Online Coordinators will be on the front lines for most of this

activity. Voluteers‟ work will crucial – it will make running a new media campaign possible. To

begin with, they will handle most of the recruitment and training of new volunteers. To recruit,

they will sign up for campaign accounts and design pages on social networks, blog and

microblog sites like Twitter, video sites such as YouTube and Google Video, and activate text (if

they don‟t already have it) on their mobile phones.

One implication of volunteer activity means means that they need some training. They

need to know what they can’t say – their limits. They need to know the activities for which they

need approval. They must learn the campaign software for data input and the structures available

for them to report. Once the first volunteers are trained, they will take over the training of other

volunteers.

Typically campaigns set specific objectives for staff activities. Now they need to set them

for volunteers too. Objectives include both goals and deadlines: How many voters does the

campaign want to register in the next week? Month? Quarter? Where do they want to avoid

registration efforts? How many residences must be canvassed in the next week, month, quarter?

How many posts to blog sites should there be in a week?

At some point early in the campaign when volunteers are needed, the staff should set

objectives and timelines for recruitment and training. The first wave volunteers will report, not

on registrations or postings, but on recruitment calls, meetings, and training sessions. (The

Obama campaign spent valuable time and money on this work at the height of the campaign, in

July and August of ‟08. Down-ballot campaigns will need to do it to.)

Volunteers will contribute more than time and money. They use their own computers,

mobile phones, and homes as satellite offices. Much of the coordination will occur via email and

text, so a large number of volunteers may be working very hard, even though they are not

physically present in the campaign headquarters. The campaign staff will need to stand by and

encourage self-organizing if volunteers are to be able to manage all the coordination and

communication activities required by the new media campaign.

As part of the recruitment process, any campaign should ask about any special skills and

pay particular attention to computer-savvy volunteers. In the Obama campaign, a group of

volunteers developed the iPhone application that, overnight, became the most popular download

on the iPhone site. Led by Project Director Raven Zachary, the team developed software that

scanned the iPhone contact list and listed all the contacts in battleground states. Armed with the

list, owners called their contacts and asked them to register, volunteer, and vote – the invaluable

word-of-mouth, person-to-person communication that is the most effective form of persuasion.

21

A final note on volunteers: They need regular infusions of water, pizza and salad, and

Chinese food. Some of them will also appreciate cookies and Twinkies.

IT Support: The IT staff members will need to design secure online interfaces for

volunteers to upload data. IT also makes sure that levels of permission are established and

electronically enforced – they have to work smoothly and politely. One greatly enlarged task will

be designing interfaces and integration paths. They will need to make sure that the output from

software is compatible with the other applications and the database and data warehouse. IT will

also be buying a lot more software, for staff and volunteers alike. Wiki software like Central

Desktop needs to be integrated with the website, social network pages, and the database.

Messaging Considerations: The staff members responsible for messaging will need to

send out daily talking points to the volunteers who are writing online. Despite their worries, they

need to allow for spontaneity and the personalization of volunteer messages. They should only

respond to seriously problematic messages; if its minor, let it go. However, the Online

Coordinator must put sharp eyes on all online messaging to encourage successful efforts and to

change or remove inappropriate messages.

There is one exception to all the volunteer activity in the messaging arena. Unless there

are identified specific situations that make it a good idea, volunteers should not design or

maintain the campaign website. This public-facing site needs to be under the control of the

strategic messaging staff and no one else. Volunteers will also need help with the piping that

makes the website, social networks, blogs, texting, and wiki all funnel data to the campaign

database.

Finally, the staff needs their own wiki-based software for fast communication between all

members of the strategic team. Those messages need to be routed to staff mobile phones and

Blackberries so everybody gets everything from the staff wiki.

New Media Metrics

If there is any one characteristic that modern communications campaigns share, it is that they are

guided by research. In marketing, advertising, public relations, and now political campaigns,

continuously gathering data and using it to guide and correct the effort is state-of-the art

22

management. Having a sophisticated computer platform like Netezza is an enormous advantage,

but down-ballot races can employ almost all the same techniques using less sophisticated means.

The path to using dynamically gathered and analyzed data for success is to move continuously

from raw data to analysis to feedback to actionable information to action:

The key to using dynamic data is to establish procedures that ensure that every opportunity is

seized to collect mobile phone numbers, email addresses, and other personal data from anyone

the campaign touches. Making someone an offer is a tried-and-true mechanism. For example,

most of the 2.9 million mobile numbers collected by the Obama campaign came from an online

offer to notify people of the identity of the VP candidate via SMS text before the name would be

released to the press. Similarly, down-ballot campaigns need to identify an offer they can make

that will inspire people to sign up.

Every staff member should collect such information from every person they contact. Every staff

member should know how to input information into the database and should put in the data daily.

These actions set the example for volunteers, who will be asked to carry out the same routine.

The Obama campaign created data sheets to ensure sure that every time a volunteer contacted a

voter, whether by telephone or canvass, the data was collected and input to the database. For

example, a canvassing team was composed of at least one team leader and a data member. The

data member was responsible for uploading the data at the end of the day.

One of the most important goals of the campaign website and social network pages should be to

collect data. The IT team needs to create automated scripts to pipe that data into the database. In

addition to personal information, the sites need to provide the campaign with activity metrics –

how many times visitors logged on to the sites, how long they stayed, how many other members

23

they contacted, the information they requested, and the number of telephone numbers they

downloaded and a record of the data they collected about the calls they made.

As a result of these activities, the database becomes the campaign‟s most valuable asset. The IT

team needs to implement levels of permissions – who can input data and where they can input it,

who can see information, who can download it, who can edit it. They also need to establish tight

security and provide for daily backup onto a different server. Campaign‟s note to self: The

opposition’s cyber-dirty tricks squad will soon be a valued member of their team – count on it.

Analyzing the data is a dark art that will almost certainly need to be performed by a contracted

third party. There are two forms of data analytics, and the campaign must be informed by each

and use them appropriately.

Formative analytics tell the campaign how to change course while an initiative is still occurring.

Analysts plot the data on on a timeline, extract the key aspects of activity or voter characteristics,

and measure progress (the trendline) towards a set goal or benchmark. Based on the results, the

campaign can change course to encourage this or that set of voters, contact other voters with

desired characteristics, amplify an activity or extinguish it.

Evaluative analytics tell the campaign what worked in the past. Analysts look at a given activity

or voter characteristic and plot it against the goal or desired outcome. The activity either

succeeded or it didn‟t – the campaign should do it again or not.

The ultimate evaluative metric? Election day and the final tally of the vote.