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Obama's Integrated New Media Marketing Campaign

Submitted by Jon Henke on Wed, 06/11/2008 - 22:53
in

The Newsweek story about the McCain and Obama campaign blogs has gotten attention for what it says about the blogs, but another point in the article is much more important. 

As our online donations come in, said Rospars, Sam calls up the contributors at random and asks why they chose to give to Barack. Like, right away? Yep, he answered. They're usually pretty surprised. Then he posts their stories on the blog. Sometimes, they even make their way in Barack's speeches. The point: "to make sure that whatever we're doing in new media is totally integrated with whatever else is going on: politics, finance, field operations, communications." For Rospars, an official campaign blog wasn't an informal diary of some dude's views on the news of the day. What was the point of that? Instead, it was a tool for harvesting useful information from supporters--and shaping their perceptions of the race with a steady stream of positive press releases, videos and news articles. [...]

If there's one phrase to describe Obama's blog--and, in fact, his entire Internet operation--it's "a means to an end"; Obama may benefit from unprecedented online enthusiasm--four to eight million email addresses, 1.5 million donors, 800,000 registered users of my.barackobama.com, his social networking platform, and hundreds of commenters on every post--but his team's greatest innovation has been its relentless focus on converting that energy into favorable offline outcomes: registration drives, caucus turnout, et cetera.

Their "new media is totally integrated".  That is having profound effects, some of which are obvious (fundraising), others of which are less visible (voter identification, online community, offline peer groups, echo chamber, stakeholder relationships).  There are various basic ways new media (or social media) can be beneficial.

  1. Messaging - communication, particularly targeted to specific audiences and influentials, rather than mass communication
  2. Mobilization - community development and reinforcement, online-to-offline activism; individual mobilization can be due to direct campaign contact, peer relationships, or general community influence
  3. Money - good fundraising is the result of doing #1 and #2 effectively; donations can reflect an investment in the ideas (#1), or in the relationship/movement (#2)

The Barack Obama campaign is putting all of these together, and in the proper order.  They aren't just running a good political campaign - they are running a good marketing campaign.

In 2003, the Howard Dean campaign experienced something similar, but they weren't able to translate the energy into offline results.  They had the means, but could not apply them to the ends. 

However, the Dean campaign made the Obama campaign possible.  The Howard Dean campaign discovered the new territory; the Obama campaign has industrialized it.

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Something's missing. . .

Submitted by Walt Gilbert on Wed, 06/11/2008 - 23:48.

. . .from Goldfarb's posts on The McCain Report.  Many blog entries -- especially the entertaining ones -- get forwarded to multiple users through email by filling in form fields.  I don't see any kind of link that says "Email this blog to a friend".  Once added, there could be a clearly visible link in each forwarded blog entry with an option to donate to the campaign.  I'm sure he could come up with some sort of tag line to get people to loosen up the purse strings. 

"Like this blog?  Donate!"

The same sort of setup could be used on all GOP candidate blogs.

It won't bring internet fundraising parity by itself, of course.  But, it's a start.

Integration is key

Submitted by Tom Readmond on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 00:08.

I think the key here is that everything is part of a fully integrated operation with its eyes clearly focused on the ultimate goal of moving votes.  MANY campaigns still have "an Internet guy" onto whom they pawn off the website and forget about it, as if it were a side operation, and then they wonder why they aren't raising millions from their website.  I've experienced that exact scenario in more than one campaign.

It's getting better

Submitted by Sean Hackbarth on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 02:34.

From my experience on Fred Thompson's campaign necessity will force departments to integrate. When fundraising was a problem the political and finance departments came to the eCampaign. Through that work they saw how useful getting everyone on the same page was. It ended up being that our online phone bank tool was the one used in field offices in Iowa and South Carolina.

I second that

Submitted by katieharbath on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 08:29.

The same thing that Sean describes from the Fred campaign also happened on the Giuliani campaign. One of the most interesting things we did towards the end of the campaign was put a form on the donation thank you page to ask people why they donated. Eventually we wanted to feed that into the site, but ran out of time. Regardless, we got a lot of responses through there and gave us some great insight into why people were giving us money. Would be a simple thing for any campaign to put on their site and get immediate feedback from their donors.

The campaign only called back... "randomly"?

Submitted by davidfarrar on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 07:46.

"As our online donations come in, said Rospars, Sam calls up the contributors at random and asks why they chose to give to Barack. Like, right away? Yep, he answered. They're usually pretty surprised."

Why not call back every contributor, every blogger, every person the campaign has emailed, every person the campaign has a telephone number? And when you do call back, make sure your campaign has the exact information on the next step the recipient needs to take for the candidate, even if it is a small step. In fact, the smaller the next step, the better.

You may ask, how would a campaign possibly have the man-power necessary to accomplish this feat?

The answer is: If you have to ask, you are not savvy enough with the Internet to be in your position in the first place. Leave immediately and find someone who is.

ex animo

davidfarrar

 

Experiment

Submitted by Sean Hackbarth on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 10:39.

That certainly could be something to experiment with to see if it resulted in more active supporters. Testing and measuring would have to be done to justify the added manpower.

What added manpower?

Submitted by davidfarrar on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 10:51.

You would need added manpower to accomplish this? That would probably cost more money than the project itself would generate.

But true, the specific approach would have to be subtle and above all rewarding to the recipient.

It would always have to start off by a simple, "Thank you, for your participation' --no. I am wrong here -- a thank you for the "specific" kind of participation the recipient put forward, and then ask if there was any issue the candidate could help the recipient with...that kind of thing.

ex animo

davidfarrar

To Do what Obama did

Submitted by karasoth on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 12:35.

And heck lets count Ron Paul for crying out loud.

#1) You need a message

#2) message needs to resonate with people

#3) Message needs to resonate with people who have a lot of passion for politics( and if you've never been in a third party its all about Passion)

 

Otherwise we can have the best integrated website ever made by man but the soft hardware won't work and -that- is the most important part

What's missing formost is...

Submitted by Terri K on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 07:38.

...an exciting candidate.  I don't think obama is exciting but I have (ill-informed) friends who literally get starry-eyed and nearly swoon at the mention of his name.  It doesn't hurt that he's the Old Media darling either.  Pretty easy to incorporate and integrate when the Old Media is singing your praises 24/7.

I reject the premise that obama's success is all due to excellent top-down campaign management.  Indeed, in this day and age, I believe that an exciting candidate energizes grassroots folks and if the candidate (or candidate's staff) is savvy enough to use and integrate new media and social networking, the grassroots will perpetuate it for you.  In other words, it's bottom up success, which I think is precisely what's happened with obama and I believe that it's the wave of the future.

Ron Paul did much the same thing, but with a near-total Old Media blackout.  He did/does have a decent website with links to youtube, myspace, facebook and other social networking sites but it was the grassroots who did the "heavy lifting", making things viral through the new media.  His PCC was, well, lacking, but the creativity and energy of the grassroots was endless, and that includes fundraising ablitiy.   

I've seen much the same on a smaller scale in Virginia; Bob Marshall energized a bunch of folks in a short period of time through the 'net and effective New Media communication and nearly beat Jim Gilmore for senate nomination.  Other candidates for congress and state offices are picking up on this as well.

Actually, it's just the opposite.

Submitted by davidfarrar on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 07:53.

If anything, the Ron Paul phenomenon proved that with the Internet and its effective use thereof, the candidate need not be "exciting" . The message has to resonate, to be sure. But if the campaign can't resonate the candidate's message, perhaps they should all quietly exit the scene and go fishing.

ex animo

davidfarrar

I disagree

Submitted by karasoth on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 08:02.

I think Most of the Ron Paul support was based on third party voters who tried and failed miserably to hijack our primary

Are Ron Paul supporters real Republicans?

Submitted by philsheldon on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 08:23.

"Are Ron Paul supporters real Republicans?"  That seems to be the question you are answering with a NO.  I disagree.  Please show me your proof.  Many of the folks I know working on this have been registered GOP folks for a long time and I think the party should be happy to have them here.  Just like the activists that came in with Pat Robertson they can bring new energy to the party.

What Reagan said:

Submitted by JMR on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 08:32.

From: http://www.reason.com/news/show/29318.html

"If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals–if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.

Now, I can’t say that I will agree with all the things that the present group who call themselves Libertarians in the sense of a party say, because I think that like in any political movement there are shades, and there are libertarians who are almost over at the point of wanting no government at all or anarchy. I believe there are legitimate government functions. There is a legitimate need in an orderly society for some government to maintain freedom or we will have tyranny by individuals. The strongest man on the block will run the neighborhood. We have government to insure that we don’t each one of us have to carry a club to defend ourselves. But again, I stand on my statement that I think that libertarianism and conservatism are travelling the same path."
...

Compare & contrast with the treatment of Ron Paul Republicans, many of them very young and very energetic:

http://dougwead.wordpress.com/2008/05/19/how-a-gop-conspiracy-continues-...

has a good rundown, but other examples abound. Do you people think these young people will be attracted to McCain over Obama or one of the third party choices this time? (And Doug's blog also outlines just how the McCain campaign has treated evangelicals, which seems to belie a recent post here.) Don't act surprised when all this disdain for new blood results in an old & dying party. Around here, it already has.
JMR

Right

Submitted by karasoth on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 08:36.

Because third party whackaloons and Neonazis are what we need to fix our party

 

 

Yeah...

Submitted by JMR on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 14:58.

That must have been what Reagan meant by "travelling the same path"!!
JMR

To borrow and distort a phrase of Irving Kristol's...

Submitted by davidfarrar on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 08:55.

. ..I like to think Republicans are all Libertarians at heart who have been mugged by reality. In any case, I am proud to say, it was that sentence that got me kicked off of the Ron Paul forum.

ex animo

davidfarrar

No your wrong

Submitted by karasoth on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 08:33.

I am saying the who did a lot of the recruiting and organizing for the Ron Paul Campaign were people who had no intention of supporting the gop after that point. I can point to a failed Libertarian Presidential canidate (I believe) and two people who are trying to get on the ballot as LP senators who suspended their campaign to try to juice up Ron Paul in the Primary. The One county in Iowa he won has for the last two election cycles given the Natural Law party canidate 25% of their vote. None of the People I know who in Florida worked for ROn Paul were republicans before the 2008 race. I know of two former county excutives for the Libertarian party who spearheaded people into the Paul Primary

 

It was an attempted Hijack

Funny, a few large-L Libertarians feel the same way

Submitted by JMR on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 08:42.

About Bob Barr:

http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2008/tle471-20080608-02.html

only the hijack attempt apparently worked.

The LP never was big enough to "hijack" either major party, and non-libertarians abounded in the Ron Paul movement here in FL. Many disappointed Republicans were amused by former Libertarians like me who'd voted for Paul in 1988, because they were finally getting the "small government" thing fully.

They were, as Doug Wead's blog shows, cut out needlessly. McCain had won after Super Tuesday, so what harm would have come from running state conventions fairly? Paul may have gotten a few dozen more delegates, but he still would have lost, and there wouldn't have been the dishonest illusion of McCain support by fiscal conservatives & constitutionalists. All the anti-libertarian hate, though, has hurt the long term chances of the Republican Party.
JMR

Problem with that is

Submitted by karasoth on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 08:44.

the Moderates Vs Radicals feud has been going on darned near since the founding of the LP

 

the moderates won 3 Platform fights and a Presidential nomination. I was a former part of the Moderate faction and I walked out of the radicalist dominion of the party I saw around 01

"Our" primary?

Submitted by Terri K on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 08:37.

Ummm, I'm a life-long republican, as are many of my friends who support Ron Paul.  A few did come over from the "dark side" (and are staying!) but that's a good thing, is it not?  And Ron Paul is a republican, in case you'd not noticed.  So tell me again what we tried to hijack?  Why do you not say this about the Huck, Guiliani, Romney, Thompson, et.al. supporters, many of whom are as bitterly disappointed as we RP supporters are?   

Your in the Minority

Submitted by karasoth on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 08:42.

If the State of Florida and Montana (where I know enough about LP party members and ron paul org members) are any indication.

 

They were trying to make the Republican party into the Constitution or Libertarian party.

 

And then there were the flakeier ones like the Natural Law party who wanted a higher vibrational state of conciousness from Ron Paul

and Ron's Neonazi buddies came along as well

Let's be fair, now.

Submitted by davidfarrar on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 09:16.

A large part of Ron Paul's supporters were, in fact, anarchists, pure and simple, who simply saw Ron Paul's candidancy as a means to an end.

ex animo

davidfarrar

Do you really believe that?

Submitted by Terri K on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 10:15.

Anarchists in the pejorative or anarchists, as in, not needing Big Brother to tell me how to run every aspect of my life?  If it's the latter, then, I'm guilty as charged. 

Though I hate to generalize, most RP supporters were simply people from every background imaginable, who want to downsize the federal government and return to the original function of the federal government, which is to protect life, liberty and property, as opposed to having its tentacles in every aspect of our lives. 

No. I mean the nosed-ringed, pierced nippled punk kid...

Submitted by davidfarrar on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 10:36.

...who suddenly looked up from his wii game long enough to realize he had no political power, and the fastest way to get some is to be the only one left standing, after tearing down the present political structure, to pick up the pieces before the next class bell sounded-- that kind of anarchist. 

ex animo

davidfarrar

OK then, maybe a candidate with an exciting message...

Submitted by Terri K on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 08:31.

...that he can articulate well?  But what's exciting about socialist "change we can believe in?". 

DUH

Submitted by karasoth on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 08:35.

"Everything that is wrong is some one elses fault... like that rich white guy over there. SO we'll take all his stuff and give it to you then everything will be awesome."

 

thats the appeal of Obama's ideas

 

Other people's stuff

So you think...

Submitted by davidfarrar on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 08:24.

...Ron Paul's Internet millions were raised by a group of third-party dudes, bent on crashing the party?

Interesting.

ex animo

davidfarrar

Based on the people I know who supported paul

Submitted by karasoth on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 08:30.

Yes.More the voters then the fundraisers but yes

The past feuds aren't the same.

Submitted by JMR on Sat, 09/13/2008 - 07:57.

When the very founder of the LP literally says the Libertarian candidate's campaign is over, which just happened

http://www.nolanchart.com/article4805.html

I'd say it's gone beyond a normal Libertarian political feud. The LP was taken over. Let's face it. It didn't even take that much money for Perot's guy Russ Verney to pull it off; in part because the Paul campaign had financially eviscerated many members of the party who saw a chance to influence the Republicans in a libertarian direction for once. That didn't work, but it doesn't change the fact that it's stupid for anyone to imply all that money & (atypical for Republicans) young, grassroots enthusiasm came from "racists," especially when many of Paul's supporters happen to be (again, atypical for Republicans) black people.

I get the sense you're not one of those people who likes admitting you're wrong. We all have that in us, but in this case, you're very much wrong. We're seeing a conservative takeover of the LP. The Barr-money gambit worked. And calling all Ron Paul supporters names won't earn you much respect from me even if I happen to agree with you about *some* of them. I could say some things right now about McCain & Obama supporters, but I won't.

To be brutally frank about it, conservatives need to concentrate more on telling the truth about libertarians, even if it's a variety of truth they don't happen to like. Start with Dr. Paul's level of financial support among our military, which was considerably more than ANY other candidate, and work forward from there. Respect is a 2 way street, which is why I don't blame Ron Paul for not-supporting the Republican ticket this time. And I'm not surprised Barr chose Paul's news conference for another "look at MEEEEE!!!" display. Nolan's right, again, but I'm not sure I can vote his way this time.
JMR

President Barack Obama's new-media effort

Submitted by ErickZ on Tue, 04/21/2009 - 00:18.

Joe Rospars, the man behind President Barack Obama's new-media effort during his election, said the campaign didn't win because it used the latest technology. Rather, its secret was a holistic approach -- one easily copied by regular marketers -- that integrated digital tools into the overall strategy.... While overall blog mentions of Obama and McCain varied greatly during the last year (and we can't say if those were positive or negative posts), close to 500 million blog postings mentioned him since the beginning of the conventions at the end of August. During the same time period, only about 150 million blog posts mentioned McCain. The U.S. economy is shaky for pretty much everybody.  Not only is it bad for Americans, but also lousy U.S. economy hits the whole world hard. The U.S. bailout measures are good for everyone worldwide, if the cash advances being made work like they're intended to.  However, some are insisting that the bailout is going to wreck the budget and make the deficit explode.  Obama and others insist there will be cuts made that will make up for it.  Regardless, let us hope that the short-term loans we're making will help to bring back the U.S. economy.