[p2p-research] Fwd: How Obama Really Did It

Mon Nov 17 13:58:23 CET 2008

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nicholas Roberts <nicholas at themediasociety.org>
Date: Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 10:09 AM
Subject: How Obama Really Did It
To: permacultue discussion list <
pil-pc-oceania at lists.permacultureinternational.org>

I am sending this article from MIT's Technology Review because I think its
important for the permaculture community to read cut through the hype and
really understand the awesome power of an internet centric - mass multi
media campaign

I'll be referrring to this on Monday night at Permaculture North's meeting
when I talk about www.Permaculture.TV

September/October 2008
How Obama <em>Really</em> Did It
The social-networking strategy that took an obscure senator to the doors of
the White House.
By David Talbot

Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign manager and Internet
impresario, describes Super Tuesday II--the March 4 primaries in Texas,
Ohio, Vermont, and Rhode Island--as the moment Barack Obama used social
technology to decisive effect. The day's largest hoard of delegates would
be contested in Texas, where a strong showing would require exceptional
discipline and voter-education efforts. In Texas, Democrats vote first at
the polls and then, if they choose, again at caucuses after the polls close.
The caucuses award one-third of the Democratic delegates.

Hillary Clinton's camp had about 20,000 volunteers at work in Texas. But in
an e-mail, Trippi learned that 104,000 Texans had joined Obama's
social-networking site, www.my.barackobama.com, known as MyBO. MyBO and the
main Obama site had already logged their share of achievements, particularly
in helping rake in cash. The month before, the freshman senator from
Illinois had set a record in American politics by garnering $55 million in
donations in a single month. In Texas, MyBO also gave the Obama team the
instant capacity to wage fully networked campaign warfare. After seeing the
volunteer numbers, Trippi says, "I remember saying, 'Game, match--it's
over.'"

The Obama campaign could get marching orders to the Texans registered with
MyBO with minimal effort. The MyBO databases could slice and dice lists of
volunteers by geographic microregion and pair people with appropriate
tasks, including prepping nearby voters on caucus procedure. "You could go
online and download the names, addresses, and phone numbers of 100 people in
your neighborhood to get out and vote--or the 40 people on your block who
were undecided," Trippi says. "'Here is the leaflet: print it out and get it
to them.' It was you, at your computer, in your house, printing and
downloading. They did it all very well." Clinton won the Texas primary vote
51 to 47 percent. But Obama's people, following their MyBO playbook, so
overwhelmed the chaotic, crowded caucuses that he scored an overall victory
in the Texas delegate count, 99 to 94. His showing nearly canceled out
Clinton's win that day in Ohio. Clinton lost her last major opportunity to
stop the Obama juggernaut. "In 1992, Carville said, 'It's the economy,
stupid,'" Trippi says, recalling the exhortation of Bill Clinton's campaign
manager, James Carville. "This year, it was the network, stupid!"

Throughout the political season, the Obama campaign has dominated new
media, capitalizing on a confluence of trends. Americans are more able to
access media-rich content online; 55 percent have broadband Internet
connections at home, double the figure for spring 2004. Social-networking
technologies have matured, and more Americans are comfortable with them.
Although the 2004 Dean campaign broke ground with its online meeting
technologies and blogging, "people didn't quite have the facility," says
Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor who has given the Obama campaign
Internet policy advice (Lessig wrote The People Own
Ideas!<http://www.technologyreview.com/article/16351/>in our May/June
2005 issue). "The world has now caught up with the
technology." The Obama campaign, he adds, recognized this early: "The key
networking advance in the Obama field operation was really deploying
community-building tools in a smart way from the very beginning."

Of course, many of the 2008 candidates had websites, click-to-donate tools,
and social-networking features--even John McCain, who does not personally
use e-mail. But the Obama team put such technologies at the center of its
campaign--among other things, recruiting 24-year-old Chris Hughes, cofounder
of Facebook, to help develop them. And it managed those tools well.
Supporters had considerable discretion to use MyBO to organize on their own;
the campaign did not micromanage but struck a balance between top-down
control and anarchy. In short, Obama, the former Chicago community
organizer, created the ultimate online political machine.

The Obama campaign did not provide access or interviews for this story; it
only confirmed some details of our reporting and offered written comments.
This story is based on interviews with third parties involved in developing
Obama's social-networking strategy or who were familiar with it, and on
public records.

*An Online Nervous System*
A row of elegant, renovated 19th-century industrial buildings lines Boston's
Congress Street east of Fort Point Channel. On any given day, behind a plain
wooden door on the third floor of 374 Congress, 15 to 20 casually clad
programmers tap away at computers. On the day I visited, the strains of
Creedence Clearwater Revival filled the room; a Ping-Pong table dominated
the small kitchen. This is the technology center for Blue State Digital,
which means that it is also the nervous system for its two largest clients,
the Barack Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Founded by
alumni of the Dean campaign, Blue State Digital added interactive elements
to Obama's website--including MyBO--and now tends to its daily care and
feeding. The site's servers hum away in a Boston suburb and are backed up in
the Chicago area.

Jascha Franklin-Hodge, 29, greeted me with a friendly handshake and a
gap-toothed grin. He has a deep voice and a hearty laugh; his face is ringed
by a narrow beard. Franklin-Hodge dropped out of MIT after his freshman year
and spent a few years in online music startups before running the Internet
infrastructure for the Dean campaign, which received a then-unprecedented
$27 million in online donations. "When the campaign ended, we thought,
'Howard Dean was not destined to be president, but what we are doing
online--this is too big to let go away,'" he says. He and three others
cofounded Blue State Digital, where he is chief technology officer. (Another
cofounder, Joe Rospars, is now on leave with the Obama campaign as its
new-media director.)

The MyBO tools are, in essence, rebuilt and consolidated versions of those
created for the Dean campaign. Dean's website allowed supporters to donate
money, organize meetings, and distribute media, says Zephyr Teachout, who
was Dean's Internet director and is now a visiting law professor at Duke
University. "We developed all the tools the Obama campaign is using: SMS
[text messaging], phone tools, Web capacity," Teachout recalls. "They [Blue
State Digital] did a lot of nice work in taking this crude set of unrelated
applications and making a complete suite."

Blue State Digital had nine days to add its tools to Obama's site before the
senator announced his candidacy on February 10, 2007, in Springfield, IL.
Among other preparations, the team braced for heavy traffic. "We made some
projections of traffic levels, contribution amounts, and e-mail levels based
on estimates from folks who worked with [John] Kerry and Dean in 2004,"
recalls Franklin-Hodge. As Obama's Springfield speech progressed, "we were
watching the traffic go up and up, surpassing all our previous records." (He
would not provide specific numbers.) It was clear that early assumptions
were low. "We blew through all of those [estimates] in February," he says.
"So we had to do a lot of work to make sure we kept up with the demand his
online success had placed on the system." By July 2008, the campaign had
raised more than $200 million from more than a million online donors (Obama
had raised $340 million from all sources by the end of June), and MyBO had
logged more than a million user accounts and facilitated 75,000 local
events, according to Blue State Digital.

MyBO and the main campaign site made it easy to give money--the fuel for any
campaign, because it pays for advertising and staff. Visitors could use
credit cards to make one-time donations or to sign up for recurring monthly
contributions. MyBO also made giving money a social event: supporters could
set personal targets, run their own fund-raising efforts, and watch personal
fund-raising thermometers rise. To bring people to the site in the first
place, the campaign sought to make Obama a ubiquitous presence on as many
new-media platforms as possible.

The viral Internet offered myriad ways to propagate unfiltered Obama
messages. The campaign posted the candidate's speeches and linked to
multimedia material generated by supporters. A music video set to an Obama
speech--"Yes We Can," by the hip-hop artist Will.i.am--has been posted
repeatedly on YouTube, but the top two postings alone have been viewed 10
million times. A single YouTube posting of Obama's March 18 speech on race
has been viewed more than four million times. Similarly, the campaign
regularly sent out text messages (at Obama rallies, speakers frequently
asked attendees to text their contact information to his campaign) and made
sure that Obama was prominent on other social-networking sites, such as
Facebook and MySpace *(see "New-Media King" chart above)*. The campaign even
used the microblogging service Twitter, garnering about 50,000 Obama
"followers" who track his short posts. "The campaign, consciously or
unconsciously, became much more of a media operation than simply a
presidential campaign, because they recognized that by putting their message
out onto these various platforms, their supporters would spread it for
them," says Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, a
website covering the intersection of politics and technology (and another
Dean alumnus). "We are going from the era of the sound bite to the sound
blast."

Money flowed in, augmenting the haul from big-ticket fund-raisers. By the
time of the Iowa caucuses on January 3, 2008, the Obama campaign had more
than $35 million on hand and was able to use MyBO to organize and instruct
caucus-goers. "They have done a great job in being precise in the use of the
tools," Teachout says. "In Iowa it was house parties, looking for a highly
committed local network. In South Carolina, it was a massive
get-out-the-vote effort." MyBO was critical both in the early caucus states,
where campaign staff was in place, and in later-voting states like Texas,
Colorado, and Wisconsin, where "we provided the tools, remote training, and
opportunity for supporters to build the campaign on their own," the Obama
campaign told *Technology Review *in a written statement. "When the campaign
eventually did deploy staff to these states, they supplemented an
already-built infrastructure and volunteer network."

Using the Web, the Obama camp turbocharged age-old campaign tools. Take
phone banks: through MyBO, the campaign chopped up the task of making calls
into thousands of chunks small enough for a supporter to handle in an hour
or two. "Millions of phone calls were made to early primary states by people
who used the website to reach out and connect with them," Franklin-Hodge
says. "On every metric, this campaign has operated on a scale that has
exceeded what has been done before. We facilitate actions of every sort:
sending e-mails out to millions and millions of people, organizing tens of
thousands of events." The key, he says, is tightly integrating online
activity with tasks people can perform in the real world. "Yes, there are
blogs and Listservs," Franklin-Hodge says. "But the point of the campaign is
to get someone to donate money, make calls, write letters, organize a house
party. The core of the software is having those links to taking action--to
doing something."

*Pork Invaders*
If the other major candidates had many of the same Web tools, their
experiences show that having them isn't enough: you must make them central
to the campaign and properly manage the networks of supporters they help
organize. Observers say that Clinton's campaign deployed good tools but
that online social networks and new media weren't as big a part of its
strategy; at least in its early months, it relied more on conventional
tactics like big fund-raisers. After all, Clinton was at the top of the
party establishment. "They [the Obama supporters] are chanting 'Yes we can,'
and she's saying 'I don't need you,'" Trippi says. "That is what the top of
that campaign said by celebrating Terry McAuliffe [the veteran political
operative and former Democratic National Committee chairman] and how many
millions he could put together with big, big checks. She doesn't need my
$25!" The two campaigns' fund-raising statistics support Trippi's argument:
48 percent of Obama's funds came from donations of less than $200, compared
with 33 percent of Clinton's, according to the Center for Responsive
Politics.

Clinton's Internet director, Peter Daou, credits the Obama campaign with
doing an "amazing job" with its online social network. "If there is a
difference in how the two campaigns approached [a Web strategy], a lot of
those differences were based on our constituencies," Daou says. "We were
reaching a different demographic of supporters and used our tools
accordingly." For example, he says, the Clinton campaign established a
presence on the baby-boomer social-networking site Eons.com, and Clinton
herself often urged listeners to visit www.hillaryclinton.com. But Andrew
Rasiej says that the conventional political wisdom questioned the value of
the Internet. "As far as major political circles were concerned," he says,
"Howard Dean failed, and therefore the Internet didn't work."

While it's hard to tease out how much Clinton's loss was due to her Web
strategy--and how much to factors such as her Iraq War vote and the
half-generation difference between her and Obama's ages--it seems clear that
her campaign deëmphasized Web strategy early on, Trippi says. Even if you
"have all the smartest bottom-up, tech-savvy people working for you," he
says, "if the candidate and the top of the campaign want to run a top-down
campaign, there is nothing you can do. It will sit there and nothing will
happen. That's kind of what happened with the Clinton campaign."

Republican Ron Paul had a different problem: Internet anarchy. Where the
Obama campaign built one central network and managed it effectively, the
Paul campaign decided early on that it would essentially be a hub for
whatever networks the organizers were setting up. The results were mixed. On
the one hand, volunteers organized successful "money bombs"--one-day online
fund-raising frenzies (the one on November 5, 2007, netted Paul $4.3
million). But sometimes the volunteers' energy--and money--was wasted, says
Justine Lam, the Paul campaign's Internet director, who is now the online
marketing director at Politicker.com. Consider the supporter-driven effort
to hire a blimp emblazoned with "Who is Ron Paul? Google Ron Paul" to cruise
up and down the East Coast last winter. "We saw all this money funding a
blimp, and thought, 'We really need this money for commercials,'" Lam says.

Then there is McCain, who--somewhat ironically--was the big Internet story
of 2000. That year, after his New Hampshire primary victory over George W.
Bush, he quickly raised $1 million online. And at times last year, he made
effective use of the Internet. His staff made videos--such as "Man in the
Arena," celebrating his wartime service--that gained popularity on YouTube.
But the McCain site is ineffectual for social networking. In late June, when
I tried to sign up on McCainSpace--the analogue to MyBO--I got error
messages. When I tried again, I was informed that I would soon get a new
password in my in-box. It never arrived. "His social-networking site was
poorly done, and people found there was nothing to do on it," says Lam. "It
was very insular, a walled garden. You don't want to keep people inside your
walled garden; you want them to spread the message to new people."

McCain's organization is playing to an older base of supporters. But it
seems not to have grasped the breadth of recent shifts in communications
technology, says David All, a Republican new-media consultant. "You have an
entire generation of folks under age 25 no longer using e-mails, not even
using Facebook; a majority are using text messaging," All says. "I get
Obama's text messages, and every one is exactly what it should be. It is
never pointless, it is always worth reading, and it has an action for you to
take. You can have hundreds of recipients on a text message. You have
hundreds of people trying to change the world in 160 characters or less.
What's the SMS strategy for John McCain? None."

The generational differences between the Obama and McCain campaigns may be
best symbolized by the distinctly retro "Pork Invaders," a game on the
McCain site (it's also a Facebook application) styled after Space Invaders,
the arcade game of the late 1970s. Pork Invaders allows you to fire bullets
that say "veto" at slow-moving flying pigs and barrels.

But it's not that the campaign isn't trying to speak to the youth of today,
as opposed to the youth of decades ago. Lately McCain has been having his
daughter Meghan and two friends write a "bloggette" from the campaign trail.
The bloggette site features a silhouette of a fetching woman in red
high-heeled shoes. "It gives a hipper, younger perspective on the campaign
and makes both of her parents seem hipper and younger," says Julie Germany,
director of the nonpartisan Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the
Internet at George Washington University. The McCain campaign did not reply
to several interview requests, but Germany predicts that the campaign will
exploit social networking in time to make a difference in November. "What we
will see is that the McCain online campaign is using the Internet just as
effectively to meet its goals as the Obama campaign," she says. Over the
summer, the McCain campaign refreshed its website. But Rasiej, for one,
doubts that McCain has enough time to make up lost ground.

*A Networked White House?*
The obvious next step for MyBO is to serve as a get-out-the-vote engine in
November. All campaigns scrutinize public records showing who is registered
to vote and whether they have voted in past elections. The Obama campaign
will be able to merge this data with MyBO data. All MyBO members' activity
will have been chronicled: every house party they attended, each online
connection, the date and amount of each donation. Rasiej sees how it might
play out: the reliable voters who signed up on MyBO but did little else may
be left alone. The most active ones will be deployed to get the unreliable
voters--whether MyBO members or not--to the polls. And personalized pitches
can be dished up, thanks to the MyBO database. "The more contextual
information they can provide the field operation, the better turnout they
will have," he says.

If Obama is elected, his Web-oriented campaign strategy could carry over
into his presidency. He could encourage his supporters to deluge members of
Congress with calls and e-mails, or use the Web to organize collective
research on policy questions. The campaign said in one of its prepared
statements that "it's certain that the relationships that have been built
between Barack Obama and his supporters, and between supporters themselves,
will not end on Election Day." But whether or not a President Obama takes
MyBO into the West Wing, it's clear that the phenomenon will forever
transform campaigning. "We're scratching the surface," Trippi says. "We're
all excited because he's got one million people signed up--but we are 300
million people in this country. We are still at the infancy stages of what
social-networking technologies are going to do, not just in our politics
but in everything. There won't be any campaign in 2012 that doesn't try to
build a social network around it."

Lessig warns that if Obama wins but doesn't govern according to principles
of openness and change, as promised, supporters may not be so interested in
serving as MyBO foot soldiers in 2012. "The thing they [the Obama camp]
don't quite recognize is how much of their enormous support comes from the
perception that this is someone different," Lessig says. "If they behave
like everyone else, how much will that stanch the passion of his support?"

But for now, it's party time. At the end of June, after Clinton suspended
her campaign, MyBO put out a call for the faithful to organize house parties
under a "Unite for Change" theme. More than 4,000 parties were organized
nationwide on June 28; I logged in and picked three parties from about a
dozen in the Boston area.

My first stop was a house party in the tony suburb of Winchester, where
several couples dutifully watched an Obama-supplied campaign video. Host
Mary Hart, an art professor in her 50s, said that Obama and his website made
her "open my house to strangers and really get something going." She added,
"I'm e-mailing people I haven't seen in 20 years. We have this tremendous
ability to use this technology to network with people. Why don't we use it?"

Next stop was a lawn party in the Boston neighborhood of Roxbury, whose
organizer, Sachielle Samedi, 34, wore a button that said "Hot Chicks Dig
Obama." She said that support for the Obama candidacy drew neighbors
together. At the party, Wayne Dudley, a retired history professor, met a
kindred spirit: Brian Murdoch, a 54-year-old Episcopal priest. The two men
buttonholed me for several minutes; Dudley predicted that Obama would bring
about "a new world order centered on people of integrity." Murdoch nodded
vigorously. It was a fine MyBO moment.

My evening ended at a packed post-collegiate party in a Somerville walk-up
apartment. Host Rebecca Herst, a 23-year-old program assistant with the
Jewish Organizing Initiative, said that MyBO--unlike Facebook--allowed her
to quickly upload her entire Gmail address book, grafting her network onto
Obama's. "It will be interesting to see what develops after this party,
because now I'm connected to all these people," she shouted over the growing
din. Two beery young men, heading for the exits, handed her two checks for
$20. Herst tucked the checks into her back pocket.

David Talbot is *Technology Review*'s chief correspondent.

-- 
-- 
Nicholas Roberts
[im] skype:niccolor

http://www.Permaculture.TV
http://www.WorkerCooperatives.com
http://www.AustralianSocialForum.org

-- 
-- 
Nicholas Roberts
[im] skype:niccolor

http://www.Permaculture.TV
http://www.WorkerCooperatives.com
http://www.AustralianSocialForum.org

-- 
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