Obama The Interactivist - Part 2
Posted in Talking Business, Talking Community Media, Talking Digital Culture, Talking Social Media, Talking Web 2.0 on November 14th, 2008
By now we all know that the election of the first African American president was an historic achievement. But Barack Obama’s election was historic for another reason too: Obama’s victory marks the sudden, disruptive arrival of networked culture on the world political stage. In fact, Obama will be the first president of networked America, the first Digital President of the United States.
When Obama stated, in his Grant Park speech on election night, that his team had run “the best campaign ever,” he was not boasting. Obama’s campaign team took him from fringe candidate to the White House and achieved staggering milestones along the way: $600 million in campaign donations; nearly 4 million individual donors; a centrally coordinated grassroots effort that saw an estimated 6 million volunteers getting the Obama vote out on election day. The numbers are staggering.
How did he do it? How did Obama generate such unprecedented levels of public engagement, enabling him to battle so effectively in so many states? What was the rock on which Obama’s successful strategy was built? The answer is clear: the Internet.
In fact, one could even argue that Barack Obama was elected because he had a great website. Does that sound silly? It isn’t. www.mybarackobama.com, planned by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, was in many ways the heart of the Obama campaign. This state-of-the-art online community was the primary vehicle and catalyst for tens of millions of individual donations to the Obama campaign. It generated an estimated 1 billion emails to members, emails that will be studied in communications courses for years to come as models of simple, direct and informative email marketing.
The website also offered easy-to-find and easy-to-use toolkits to promote local activism, and a platform for members to create and join action groups. The Florida Veterans for Obama, for example, garnered 5157 members, hosted 521 events, made 19,598 calls and raised $27,982.59 during the campaign. There were over 35,000 of these self-organizing groups that cost the campaign nothing in terms of time or money, but that contributed energetically to its success. Scalability and hyper-efficiency are two of the key qualities of networked communications and the Obama campaign thoroughly understood their power.
Interestingly, the single largest group that formed on Obama’s community website during the campaign was created to attack him on a point of policy, including posts encouraging members to vote McCain unless Obama stopped supporting Bush’s controversial surveillance bill (FISA). So what did Obama do when he was directly challenged in the middle of his campaign on his own website? Seemingly very little. He did not “feed the trolls,” as the old Internet adage goes. Nor did he respond with a knee-jerk command-and-control reaction such as deleting the group or its members, which would have been disastrous. Instead he watched and waited, comfortable in the knowledge that some disagreement is inevitable on any community website, and that should the issue blow up, having its epicenter on his own turf would actually make it easier to deal with than otherwise. Ultimately, although unsatisfying to those who wanted him to change his position, Obama’s response was web-savvy, and clearly succeeded in minimizing the impact of the dissent.
One doubts whether the team running www.johmccain.com would have acted with the same forbearance, as McCain’s online campaign reflected his lack of understanding of networked culture. Remember, this is a candidate who admitted that he did not know how to use email, and who, for all we know, may never even have surfed the web. That www.mybarackobama.com was written using open-source code (PHP) while www.johnmccain.com was written in Microsoft’s .ASP language is not perhaps the defining distinction between the two men and their campaigns, but it is nevertheless a potent and relevant symbol of their differences both online and off.
The power to create, to connect and to share lies at the heart of networked culture as it lies at the heart of Obama’s idealism. Americans were drawn to Obama‘s inspirational character, intellectual acuity and moral leadership but the deep relationships that they felt with the man and his message were nurtured through online networking tools that put real power in real people’s hands. His slogans – “yes we can” and “the change we need” – were made manifest by an online platform that posited and enacted a revitalized American identity. In the end, history will show that it was Obama’s ability to align his inspirational brand with the Internet’s profoundly democratic character that gave him his victory, and that made an African American the first digital president.
Yet as Obama said in his Grant Park speech, his election is not an end but a beginning. The critical question then becomes: now that Obama has used the power of the web to get elected, how will he use it to govern?
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