Electing a President – with digital media

The story of the web and US politics began back in 2003, on the under-funded campaign trail of presidential candidate Howard Dean which broke new ground with the ‘Blogging For America’ movement and grassroots web-centric social involvement. It was a radical campaign strategy led by Joe Trippi and the first time the web had been used successfully to drive party donations on a massive scale. Thomas Gensemer was instrumental in the way Dean embraced digital media and began a process that would change the nature of campaigning.

“We scratched the surface of the web in the Howard Dean campaign. On tiny budgets we started to reach voters at a local level and uncovered a new way to communicate. Back then the technology was younger and social media was yet to gain traction, but the approaches were a step-change for both campaigns and the people who ran them.” Gensemer is clear that a major challenge was in persuading the political machine to embrace change. Campaigns are fierce, frenzied engines with thousands of moving parts and prone to lightening changes of direction. There’s never a second chance and the risks of trying new approaches are often too uncomfortable for both campaign managers and political candidates.

“Barack Obama was a once in a lifetime candidate”, explains Gensemer, clearly still humbled by having the opportunity to play a part in the election machine. But in both the presidential candidate and campaign manager David Plouffe, Gensemer had found a once in a lifetime openness to change in the tactics of politics. It’s easy to forget that until this election, battles were won and lost in primetime soundbites of CNN and NBC; messaging strategy was set from overnight telephone polling with pollsters acting as gatekeepers to the voters’ minds; campaigning meant advertising, advertising meant TV spots, and TV spots meant big bucks for every message; strategists focussed on swing states; ideology was reduced to simplicity and the massive lobbying machine was kept out of site and out of message.

“Barack Obama was a once in a lifetime candidate”

Being picked for the team

Gensemer’s company - Blue State Digital - became involved with the Obama campaign at what he recalls was as “the political turning point for the country”. No surprise that their primary focus previously had been with political candidates, non-profits and the Democratic Party, but their selection by the Obama for America campaign was as much based on the technology tools, as their strategy and thinking. “We’d built a suite of tools that had been used by the Democratic party before”, explained Thomas. “This meant we had an engine that could run straight away”.

A new way in American politics with digital at the centre

Anyone familiar with US politics will know campaigns are fierce engines. They move at rapid speed, with brutally autocratic structures that drive strategy and message delivery. What marketers know as ‘customer insight’ is driven by pollsters and communications channel managers execute the message rather than helping build it. The Obama for America campaign changed this.

“We were not just a communications’ vehicle or fundraising tool, but instead were at the level of senior political campaign staff”, explains Gensemer describing the contrast in the role digital comms played. Senior staffers would use email open rates and web traffic logs to get immediate insight into voter and supporter opinion, using this alongside the well established tools. Quant data from digital channels provides rapid insight about people’s opinion, and when the sample sizes are large enough (and the segmentation smart enough), it is a brilliant indicator for national trends. Having a real seat at the table is something digital marketers didn’t have in 2004. They started to play a more substantial role in 2006, but it wasn’t until 2008 that they played a major role in helping to shape campaign strategy.

Qualitative insights came en-masse from the blogs and videos submitted through MyBarackObama.com, and the consumer generated content around YouTube and the social media platforms. This clearly gave insight into the language and drivers people had within their responses to different policy initiatives. In the right hands the web provides incredible insight, like a thousand focus groups playing out in real time – giving any of the campaign team a permanent seat in the room.

“The digital ‘add-on’ of the model in the last 10 years of marketing is too often at odds with an organisation’s business. Many organisations simply have the wrong structure in place, so creating new models was a key difference in how the Obama campaign was organised.”

Social media, social organisation

Gensemer is a clear believer in the web’s power in social organisation, but this is the first time it’s been successfully harnessed this at massive scale in politics. The technology was simply an enabler of a much more powerful discussion: “The power of a neighbour knocking on a neighbour’s door was more powerful than anything else”.

The campaign gave grassroots supporters the language and structure to explain political messaging. Rather than relying on mass media and the agonising shallowness of political soundbites, Obama for America could create and deliver detailed messages to its growing supporter base. Senior political staff pealed back the layers of US politics to explain policy in depth for the first time. The complexity of healthcare reform, the massive economic challenges of recovery, the shift in foreign policy stance: they were all delivered direct to supporters with the insight and understanding that gave them the confidence to take that conversation further. And those conversations happened - in their hundreds of millions. From the house parties in the homes of the party faithful, to the outreach programmes to touch non-supporters, to the neighbourhood rallies that translated the national agenda to the local level, to the cars and lifts on voting day that brought people to the ballot box.

Obama for America treated its supporters as ambassadors for the Obama brand, not footsoldiers in suburban trenches. They involved and invited, initiated and inspired – and the technical-social engine Blue State Digital helped to build made that possible. They built an organisation free from the Washington political baggage that was as at home on the factory floor in Detroit as it was at the brunch tables of Manhattan.

“At the start we were the rank outsider”

The vast majority of traffic to BarackObama.com was in direct response to the emails sent out to party supporters and forwarded onto their friends. “The political channel has to deliver immediate and dynamic relationships with individuals and email gave us this,” explains Gensemer. The core of the marketing engine was a database of 13.5m people’s email addresses with explicit permissions to contact. Beyond contact details and donation history, there were hundreds of further variables for each record, providing a massive, granular segmentation to the database.

“We realised we needed to treat audiences differently so it wasn’t intended to be about the one to many approach in marketing. There’s a ladder of participation, a ‘1:9:90’ rule behind every group of a hundred. It’s true in fan clubs, advocacy groups and political organisations, so our communications had to reflect this. When you apply these principles to the structure of campaign organisations and think about what’s scaleable and how it works, you end up with a different approach. For groups who want to embrace it, this is a return to social organising – but in a new, scalable form. Blue State Digital’s approach is to let technology -- ours and others – serve to support these very traditional notions of organizing and advocacy. Too many brands, causes and campaigns have, instead, been hampered and confused by technology.”

New responsiveness; new results

When politics is under pressure, it gets ugly. There’s no greater pressure than an election, and when thousands of people’s careers are on the line, that ugliness spills across a nation. For all the aspirations of freedom and intellect, in the run-up to voting day Western democracy looks more like a boxing match in most countries, with bloodthirsty media urging the next punch. The more brutal the punches, the more airtime they get.

Digital channels started to change this. More than any election before, what was either private or filtered was now public and transparent. Gensemer recalls one example of this in Minneapolis: “Guiliani was introducing Sarah Palin at a Republican rally, and the speech that followed became a real attack on communities and social organisation. We’d engaged 10 million people in the campaign at that point, and from hearing the comments and blogs of those watching, the attack Palin made felt like an attack on them.”

What happened next was a political paradox. Before Palin set down there was a frenzy of web activity. The TV news cycle was yet to report, but it was clear that among Obama supporters there was massive sense of personal insult. “In the campaign we had the power to direct the spotlight, so when this happened we let our people know – millions of them,” explains Gensemer. “Within 10 minutes of her walking off stage we sent an email to our supporters. The email was 120 words long and turned that emotion into what became the biggest fundraising day of the campaign. Over the course of the next 24 hrs the news cycle was as much about the backlash to what Palin had said as it was about their message”.

The technology enabled people to connect more effectively. When senior staffers asked whether a new supporter could be contacted by an existing supporter 48 hrs after they declared, only a digitally-centric campaign engine could allow this. “The community response was about the timeliness and the efficiency of our organisation to get the message out there.”

Digital campaign stats

• Engaged more than 13.5m individual supporters
• Fundraising over $550 million from 3.2m individual donors
• Over 2 billion individual emails sent, including 3,000 unique messaging segments
• More than 4m individual profiles created on MyBarackObama.com social media platform
• 7m voter-to-voter phone calls made via Blue State Digital’s virtual phone banking tool (including 2.6m in the final weekend before Election Day)

Digital strategy takeouts

• In political marketing shorten the approval process to minutes rather than hours
• Focus on the message and not the packaging glitz
• Invest in data profiling and segmentation
• Create targeted messaging rather than the one-size-fits-all
• Don’t see digital as something that lives in a lost corner of the organisation

How did the supporters stay on message, online?

The simple answer is that all the people involved at grassroots were not on message all of the time, but that the community and the architects of the platforms behind it had the scope to amplify those who were. There were 4m profiles on the MyBarackObama.com blogging platform, and Thomas Gensemer is clear “you could never control what people were saying”, however they were able to “have the spotlight shone on those that did something great.”

Political legacy: enfranchising a generation

The greatest legacy of this campaign is a change in the level of political debate in the US. It stretches across the future from today’s administration. Politics has been opened up, its mechanics made transparent, the involvement of millions in the policy discussions has become possible. As you travel through America, there’s a palpable sense of a new understanding of what government does, how ideology is translated into policy and the trade-offs politicians have to make and voters have to accept. The political agenda the administration inherited was poles apart from where they wanted the focus and the worst since the great depression: an unpopular un-winnable war in the Middle-East, near-collapse in the financial services sector, economic depression and an empty bank account. Yet ‘Obama for America’ continues to target millions with its emails every week, building issue-focussed attention and relating national change to local issues. The Obama YouTube channel continues to deliver cut-through, the online address to the nation continues to reach the American people, and the blogs run high on the energy of local participation. A new era in politics has begun, and this is the team that helped make it happen.

Look out for our interviews with Howard Dean campaigner Joe Trippi and President Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe. Want to comment on this article? Email Danny Meadows-Klue on Danny@Netimperative.com with comments for publication.

Danny has been coaching firms in digital marketing for over 15 years. More than 45,000 people have attended his talks and courses in over 30 countries. He set up and ran the UK and European IAB trade associations for almost 10 years, was the pioneering publisher of Telegraph.co.uk, held the Vice Presidency of NBC’s European internet business, and has been a government policy advisor in the UK. He is chairman of the Digital Training Academy that coaches marketing teams to improve their ROI and founder of the Digital Strategy Consulting practice that creates internet marketing strategies for brands. He is a Commissioner at the digital marketing regulator in the UK, and the publisher of Netimperative and Digital Intelligence. He now coaches management teams, helping them accelerate their businesses and transform their organizations. Contact him on Danny@DigitalStrategyConsulting.com or http://uk.linkedin.com/in/dannymeadowsklue