The selling of Brand Obama

Barack Obama's campaign should be used as a case study in classrooms across the country. The Obama campaign made unprecedented use of social network sites and used existing web tools in exceptionally saavy ways to understand his supporters and shape and position messages to influence them. They employed some of the best talent in the field - including Joe Rospars, who managed Howard Dean's internet presence in 2004, and Chris Hughes, one of the co-founders of Facebook - and gave them the support and latitude to accomplish what they were brought in to do. There was an impressive degree of integration across the different dimensions of the campaign. When television ads were launched in battleground states, they were also posted on YouTube and displayed on the campaign's Facebook page, where they were picked up by Obama's 2.8 million Facebook friends and shared with others. Any gaffe by John McCain was similarly broadcast across the wide internet landscape, which the campaign understood better than their rival did.


The Obama campaign understood that "people influence people." Every time a new supporter signed up to be one of Obama's Facebook friends, that supporter's new affiliation was automatically broadcast to all of his or her Facebook friends. On average, each Facebook user has 150 "friends" plugged into his or her network, some have as many as 600, a few have many more. Of course, many of these "friends" already share political leanings, and many may also be part of Obama's Facebook community. Still, doing the math, we're talking about a potential social network of 367 million people - greater than the entire population of the U.S.* I wish I had better tools to estimate the likely number of distinct individuals pulled in as friends of the 2.8 million Obama supporters on Facebook. It's big. Let's leave it at that.


Many of these supporters also set up their own accounts on My.BarackObama.com, where they could blog about their own campaigning and canvassing efforts, post photos, and set up their own fundraising pages with their own messages. As people registered on My.BarackObama.com, the campaign gathered information about them. Some of this information was volunteered - name, address, email, cell number - but the campaign also deposited a cookie on each vistor's web browser, allowing the campaign to track where that supporter went after he or she left the site. This allowed the campaign to know where the supporter was getting his or her news and entertainment, helping to craft advertising plans.


Ultimately, every registered supporter was recruited, by carefully targeted emails, to donate, or volunteer at phone banks, or contribute to canvassing and get out the vote efforts. When volunteers showed up at campaign headquarters, they were given lists that were made more precise by the campaign's capability to gather information from its web-based resources. All of these campaign offices, set up across the country, even in states Democrats often skipped, were financed by the unrivalled web-based fund-raising accomplished by the campaign. Some estimates suggest the campaign raised somewhere in the neighborhood of $700 million dollars.


In the end, of course, Obama won the race and in the process captured 7.7 million of the 11.7 million voters under 29 who cast a ballot. The number of voters under 29 was greater than the number of senior citizens who voted. It will take some time to fully understand the numbers, and grasp what motivated voters and which messages caught their attention. But there seems broad consenus that Obama's bet on younger voters paid off, and his use of the web and the power of social networking sites generated armies of volunteers and helped generate unimagined financial support.


Obama's campaign had the insight to see the web as a campaign tool with impressive reach, and, more so than any political campaign before, they grasped the utility of social networking sites to connect with people (and connect people to people). They brought in the talent to give shape and form to their ambitions. Furthermore - and this is a powerful lesson for future campaigns and social movements - they trusted millions of supporters to do a great deal of the work, downloading videos and passing them around, creating their own content and sharing it. This might seem like a risky move for a campaign so focused on communicating a carefully scripted message - emphasizing the candidate's commitment to change, while backgrounding discussions of race - but the campaign was counting on a preexisting set of practices it understood very well. Or rather, that Chris Hughes knew well. From his work on Facebook, Hughes knew that most supporters would share videos and other content crafted by the campaign. What the campaign counted on was that their message would be passed hand-to-hand, shared among "friends."


The Obama campaign was confronted with a workplace extending across the full landscape of the United States, and had to deploy "workers" who were unpaid and had no formal position within the organization. Yet, for their model to work, they needed to trust these supporters to broadcast their message and carry out the groundwork necessary to get out the vote. This, it seems to me, is a quintessentially progressive impulse - Obama trusted us to help him do the work that was necessary to seize the White House. But he's also no fool, he wasn't going to put all his money on us going out there and building buzz on blogs and capturing the look and feel of his campaign with our clumsy photos. He gave the professionals some work to do, and then asked us to pitch in. Seems like a model for government too, doesn't it?

* My own imperfect research shows that 2 Facebook friends probably have 37 other friends in common, assuming they have 150 friends each.