Four years ago a lot was written about the Howard Dean campaign’s use of internet tools to revolutionize both fundraising and recruitment of volunteers (example: Ed Cone: The Marketing of the President 2004). The media coverage of the current campaign is obsessed with the Clinton-Obama conflict and seems less interested in those “technical” aspects. A new Atlantic story reports on Obama’s money machine:
To understand how Obama’s war chest has grown so rapidly, it helps to think of his Web site as an extension of the social-networking boom that has consumed Silicon Valley over the past few years. The purpose of social networking is to connect friends and share information, its animating idea being that people will do this more readily and comfortably when the information comes to them from a friend rather than from a newspaper or expert or similarly distant authority they don’t know and trust. The success of social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and, later, professional networking sites like LinkedIn all but ensured that someday the concept would find its way into campaigning. A precursor, Meetup.com, helped supporters of Howard Dean organize gatherings during the last Democratic primary season, but compared with today’s sites, it was a blunt instrument.
Using social networking tools in the campaign seems like something everyone must do in 2008. The success must be in the details and the dedication to the concept. Obama’s behaviour at stadium crowds (rock star style) might help explain:
[W]hile his rivals continued to depend on big givers, Obama gained more and more small donors, until they finally eclipsed the big ones altogether. In February, the Obama campaign reported that 94 percent of their donations came in increments of $200 or less, versus 26 percent for Clinton and 13 percent for McCain. Obama’s claim of 1,276,000 donors through March is so large that Clinton doesn’t bother to compete; she stopped regularly providing her own number last year.(…) Obama himself shrewdly capitalizes on both the turnout and the connectivity of his stadium crowds by routinely asking them to hold up their cell phones and punch in a five-digit number to text their contact information to the campaign-to win their commitment right there on the spot.
UPDATE MAY 19: Obama draws tens of thousands at a rally in Portland. If he could get all those to text their contact info…
UPDATE MAY 26: Roger Cohen in the New York Times:
Obama has been a classic Internet-start up, a movement spreading with viral intensity and propelled by some of Silicon Valley’s most creative minds. As with any online phenomenon, he has jumped national borders, stirring as much buzz in Berlin as he does back home. He could not have achieved this without a sense of history, a conviction that the nature of the post-post-9/11 world – the one beyond war without end – is going to be determined by sociability and connectivity. In the globalized world of MySpace, LinkedIn and the rest, sociability is a force as strong as sovereignty.
