Obama New Media - White Paper Version

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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,”

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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.”

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“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.

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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
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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

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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.

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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.

Obama New Media - White Paper Version

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