barack obama how content management and web 2 0 helped win the white house

7/29/2019 Barack Obama How Content Management and Web 2 0 Helped Win the White House

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MARCH.APRIL.09 | volume 23 number 2 | www.infonomicsmag.com

BARACKOBAMA:

How Content Management andWeb 2.0 helped Win the White House

The Untold, Inside Story

26Industry

Benchmarking:What distinguishesa successful EnterpriseContent Management

deploymentand wheredo you stack up?

32Five Steps to

Building your PersonalLeadership Brand

58Open-Source WebContent Management

Systems: Bargain orNightmare?


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BA

RACK

OBAM

A:

INFONOMICS | MARCH.APRIL.09 .ioomicma.com36


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ObAMA OR AMeRICA

wAsnt just tHe MOst

suCCessuL OnLIne

POLItICAL CAMPAIgn;

It wAs ARguAbLy tHe

MOst suCCessuLweb 2.0 dePLOyMent

tO dAte. HeRes tHe

InsIde stORy O HOw

It ALL wORked.

WheN I FIrSt Sat dOwN wIth U.S. SeNatOr BaraCk OBaMa tO talk aBOUt

running or President in the all o 2006some our months beore he announced

hed enter the raceit was already clear where he saw himsel. We sat in his

Senate oice, under a wall decorated with photos o Martin Luther K ing, Jr., Abraham

Lincoln, Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, Thurgood Marsha ll, and John F. Kennedyall

men called orth in g reat historical moments to lead a movement and become the standard

bearer or a generations ideals.

I asked him whether he thought he was at a similar moment in time. Im not a politicalmechanic, he said, but in terms o the big picture and instincts as to whats important to the

country and whats important to people, I think my instincts are good.

So was this his time? He smiled: I agree with the saying that timing is everything, but I

believe that whether you have a good sense o timi ng is largely determined retrospect ively.

It turned out that his t iming was perecta new world was orming and technologies

like YouTube, Facebook, and text messag ing that barely existed just our years prior had

matured to become a par t o everyday lie. And rom the irst moments o Barack Obamas

campaign in February 2007, his bottom-up, revolutionary st yle contrasted sharply with

that o Hillar y Clinton and John McCain.

by gARRett M. gRA

.ioomicma.com MARCH.APRIL.09 | INFONOMICS 37


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the NUtS aNd BOltS OF a revOlUtION

Indeed, in any discussion o the 2008

presidential race, its important to stipulate

this act right up ront: in any prior year,

Barack Obama would have lost. Here was

a junior senator, a relatively-unknown

black politician running against the most

established, powerul, and well-nanced

Democratic machine in modern history:

the Clinton amily. So how did a man just

our years removed rom the Illinois State

Senate catapult himsel to the White House

in a landslide and deeat two o politics

best-known brands, Hillary Clinton and

John McCain? How did he pull o a stag-

gering margin o nearly 200 electoral votes

and 8.5 million popular votes and win ninestates George W. Bush took in 2004?

The short answer is that Barack Obama

understood that since the last open presi-

dential election in 2000, the technological

revolution that has changed every aspect o

American lie had undamentally realigned

the power dynamic in politics as well. So

while Hillary Clinton and John McCain set

out to run the last campaign all over again,

Obama orged ahead and ran the rst

campaign o the 21st Century. The sheer

scale o his presidential bid dwared every-

thing that came beore it: The campaign

surpassed some three million individual

contributorsmillions more than George

W. Bush garnered as the sitting president in

2004; Obamas Facebook page had more than

three million riendssix times more than

John McCain; and there were more than

100,000 supporter-organized events across

the country. The campaigns email list surged

to more than 13 million addresses, larger

than the combined size o the lists o the

national Democratic party, MoveOn.orga

liberal policy advocacy groupand U.S. Sen.

John Kerry, George W. Bushs opponent in

the 2004 presidential election. Indeed, thesuccess o Obamas undraising eort was so

unprecedented that by the nal weeks o the

campaign he was buying 30-minute blocks o

national network television time and adver-

tising in Xbox video games.

The campaign had 57 separate MySpace

proles, as well as presences (both ocial

and unocial) on Facebook, Flickr, Digg,

Eventul, LinkedIn, BlackPlanet, Faith-

Base, Eons, Glee, MiGente, MyBatanga,

AsianAve, and the Democratic National

Committees own Partybuilder platorm.

Whereas our years prior Vermont Gov.

Howard Deans presidential campaign ranjust two websitesits ocial one and the

campaign blogObamas team oversaw

more than a hundred dierent websites

rom MySpace to FightTheSmears.org.

This vast Web presence helped spread

the campaign message even on the micro-

blogging site Twitter.com, where Obama

amassed some quarter million ollowers.

The 2008 presidential race was going to

be historic no matter what. Only once since

the 1920s had the nation seen a race without

an incumbent president or vice president

in the raceand that race (1952) involved

ve-star General Dwight D. Eisenhower,

the supreme allied commander o World

War II, who been proered the nomination

o both parties. Nevertheless, the presiden-

tial contest o 2008, which lasted on the

Democratic side through 57 primaries and

caucuses and saw more Americans vote

than ever beore, proved even more o a

turning point than pundits imagined.

To say that Obama won because o the

Internet would be an oversimplication;

its more accurate to say that he couldnt

have won without it. In my search or the

killer app, or evidence o how technologywas used in groundbreaking new ways,

Ive come to realize that what really hap-

pened with Obama is ar more complicated

and nuanced, explains Michael Silber-

man, who headed Howard Deans online

organizing eorts in 2004 and now is

managing director o the Washington oce

o Internet strategy rm EchoDitto. The

game-changer in the Obama campaign,

as I ound in talking to key staand in

volunteering mysel in southern Ohio

was that technology and the Internet was

not an add-on or them. It was a careully

considered element o almost every critical

campaign unction.

As Obamas sta tell it, his was the rst

presidential campaign where nobody was

trying to kill Web eorts. From start-to-

nish, Obama or Americathe campaigns

ocial websitewasnt just the most

successul online political campaign but

arguably the most successul Web 2.0 deploy-

ment to date anywhere. The story o how

the campaign put all the pieces o that jigsaw

puzzle togethermany specics o which

have never been told beoreis one o tight

coordination and top-to-bottom integration.

the OBaMa trIFeCta: MeSSage,

MONey, MOBIlIzatIONIn many ways Obamas campaign was like

the band that took 10 years to become an

overnight sensation. Personally hes been

honing the skills and ethos o organizing

and community building since he started

working in the 1980s as a $1,000-a-month

community organizer with the Developing

Communities Project in Chicagos South

Side. As he said in a 1995 article at the

outset o his campaign or the Illinois state

senate, In America, we have this strong

bias toward individual action. You know,

we idolize the John Wayne hero who

comes in to correct things with both guns

blazing. But individual actions, individual

dreams, are not sucient. We must unite

in collective action, build collective insti-

tutions and organizations.

Obamas successul model ocused on

The Three Ms: message, money, and

mobilization, each enhancing the next in a

virtuous cycle that enabled the campaign

to steamroll all comers. Barack had to be

a dierent kind o candidate. I he ran as

a traditional candidate, he wasnt going to

be successul, explains deputy campaign

manager Steve Hildebrand, a 22-year vet-eran campaign organizer. As Gina Cooper,

one o the grassroots activists who came

out o the Dean 2004 campaign explains,

Barack Obamas campaign [was] about

rewriting the social contract between citi-

zens and government.

While the media and pundits swoon at

how unexpected Obamas success has been,

the campaign never had any doubt: At the

very start o construction o his website

and organizing tools, they aimed big to

ensure they could scale up rapidly as the

campaign grew. Much eort was expended

HOw COntent MAnAgeMent And web 2.0 HeLPed wIn tHe wHIte HOuse



5/9

in determining the right toolset, in

streamlining and minimizing the number

o databases, and in ensuring integration

up and down the campaign hierarchy.

Great thought was put into ensuring that

the campaign and the Internet were ully

integrated, which resulted in a sophisti-

cated setup whereby instead o existing

as its own silo in the campaign hierarchy,

the technology team simultaneously was

a part o the undraising, eld, and com-

munications apparatus. Obama blurred the

traditional denitions o the three skills in

ways no candidate had ever done beore.

One o the things he recognized early on

was that online eorts cant be done on the

cheap anymorethe days o the candidatesgeeky nephew as webmaster were gone.

One o the rst signs o Obamas grasp o

this act was that he hired Jim Brayton as

his U.S. Senate webmaster; Brayton had

been the webmaster o Howard Deans

2004 presidential campaign and was

experienced with massive databases, email

lists, and websites ar larger than that o a

normal reshman senator.

hIrINg tOp teChNOlOgy BraINS

For the presidential campaign, Obama

turned to Joe Rospars, another 2004Dean veteran now with the rm Blue

State Digital, which provided much o

the backbone o the campaigns technical

inrastructure. His head o online organiz-

ing was Chris Hughes, co-ounder with

Mark Zuckerberg o Facebook.com, and he

hired executives rom technology compa-

nies like Upcoming.org and Orbitz as well.

All told, Obamas online sta numbered

close to 90 by the end, and Obama or

America (BarackObama.com) spent mil-

lions o dollars on servers, email systems,

development, and text messaging. Initial

development alone ran nearly $2 million in

2007, which would have seemed absurdly

high to most candidates.

One problem the campaign tackled

immediately was integrating a single

database as the back-end o all the various

tools, something never beore success-

ully done in a presidential campaign. The

single core database, which stretched to

terabytes o data, helped power and enable

cross-platorm integration never beore

seen. The task o database integration ell

to Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Blue States

chie technology ocer, who had seen how

the Dean campaign in 2004 was hampered

by its reliance on hal a dozen dierent

databases. Using MySQL and PHP, Frank-lin-Hodge created a single-core database

to serve all MyBarackObama.com (MyBO)

users in all their core activitiesdonations,

social networking, and activism. (MySQL

is a widely-used open-source database;

PHP, launched in 1994 as Personal Home

Page, is a widely-used scripting language

used in producing dynamic Web pages).

It allowed the campaign to do central-

ized list-cutting and get a view o who

was using the site, says Franklin-Hodge.

All told, Blue State had about 20 people

dedicated to the Obama campaign inra-structure. For MyBO, Blue State built

several layers o content management.

Much o the site was powered by Move-

able Type, an open-source Web-content

management tool that enables users to

build blogs, websites, and social networks

on a single platorm. The campaign and

Blue State also ended up creating many

pages in basic HTML in order to combine

unctionality and integrate dierent tools.

As Franklin-Hodge says, Not surprisingly,

most things that the campaign wanted to

do ended up having an action.

The real genius o the Obama campaign

didnt lie in its toolkit, though. The sotware,

organizing tools, email and texting capabili-

ties, voter les, and credit card processing

systems were all available to any candidate

in this election cycle. Online tools today

are commodities. It was how the campaign

exploited those tools that set it apart. As

Jeremy Bird, one o the campaigns leading

eld organizers explains, The Internet is

the hammer, not the strategy.

NO weBOphOBIa

Even today on most campaignsand, or

that matter, in most business environ-

mentssenior sta tend to be wary o the

Internets Wild-West nature and especiallywary o the openness necessary to run a

successul online venture. The McCain

campaign and the Clinton campaign both

saw regular riction between their online

sta and more traditional senior sta.

Whereas in 2000, McCains campaign had

been an online pioneerhe was the rst

candidate to raise a million dollars online

the 2008 campaign seemed like a dinosaur.

Terry Nelson, McCains political director,

asked that every page o the campaign

website be printed out or approval.

Not so in the Obama camp. Sta rom

the campaign manager right down to

eld organizers considered the Internet

and inormation technology critical to

everything they did. That recognition, o

top-to-bottom integration and philosophical

buy-in, was what proved so transorma-

tive. I we dont do this right, shame on us.

Were never going to have an opportunity

like this again, Hildebrand recalls saying.

We cant be just so single-minded that this

is about Barack Obama. Its about a move-

ment that changes the way we do business

at every level. Even the candidate himsel

was a techie: Obama amously cherisheshis BlackBerry, and on the campaign trail

he regularly zoned out with his iPod. Its

air to say that no presidential candidate in

history has had a better grasp o the latest

technologya act that surely helps explain

the green light Obama gave early on to a

no-holds-barred Web 2.0 assault.

Each morning, beginning the Monday

ater Obamas weekend announcement that

he would run or president in February

2007, the campaigns Web team-vendors,

new media team, eld sta, and senior

strategistsincluding Chie Technology

tHe PROCess wAs ReMARkAbLy sMOOtHAnd ORgAnIzed OR A PResIdentIAL CAM-PAIgn. tHeRe wAsnt tHe InteRnAL dRAMAtHAt Oten HOunds vendORs, wHeRedIeRent PeOPLe ORdeR dIeRenttHIngs. ROM A PROCess sIde, It wAssHOCkIngLy unCtIOnAL.



6/9

Ocer Michael Slabygathered or a 9

a.m. conerence call to talk through to-do

lists and hot issues. Its not a job where

you can turn o at 5 p.m., Franklin-Hodge

says. However, he adds, The process was

remarkably smooth and organized or a

presidential campaign. There wasnt the

internal drama that oten hounds vendors,

where dierent people order dierent

things. From a process side, it was shock-

ingly unctional.

Teams worked around the clock and

multi-page disaster recovery documents

outlined contingencies or just about every

tech-related possibility. Given the pace o

money owing in onlineespecially dur-

ing key events like Obamas August 2008

Democratic convention-oor speech, when

donations poured in at $2 million an hour

any outage could have had a huge impact on

campaign resources. For moments like that,

Blue State turned back to a model rom theDean campaign and built an entire back-up

contribution system in case o emergency,

though their rontline system proved so

robust it was never used.

hIrINg the MedIa, explOItINg the

BlOgOSphere aNd yOUtUBe

Understanding the importance o message

amidst the larger campaign, Joe Rospars,

the campaigns online director, skillully

recruited journalists to script the narrative

o a grassroots movement. It was impor-

tant, Rospars says, that his bloggers and

online media team had a sense o story-tell-

ing and narrative. So Sam Graham-Felson,

ormerly o The Nation magazine, became

the campaigns lead blogger, while Kate

Albright-Hana, ormerly a documentar-

ian or CNN, became one o the lead video

gurus. The campaign explained that its

heavy online posting schedule and the

narrative it developed through roughly

20 blog-posts per day turned out to be an

unexpectedly valuable eld organizing

tool, since people in the eld were using the

stories o supporters on the blog to connect

with undecided voters.

These numbers were just unimaginable,

but we tried to take a magniying glass and

make sure that the individuals didnt get lost,says Graham-Felson, who traveled the coun-

try or almost two years collecting stories and

interviewing supporters. When campaign

manager David Ploue had something to

say, he ipped open his Apple Mac Book

and recorded short Web videos to broadcast

to supporters, updating them on campaign

eorts. These narrative eortsand the tools

they usedwere unprecedented. All told,

the campaign created nearly 2,000 YouTube

videos, which in turn were watched or some

14.6 million hours, according to a study by

TubeMogul.com.

This multitude o videos, Graham-Felson

explains, was part o a broad microtarget-

ing eort whereby each video was aimed

at speaking to a particular group o voters

or supporters. Those eorts paid o in a

big way: TubeMogul estimated that Obama

received the equivalent o some $45 million

in ree television airtime rom people

watching those videos. One o the surpris-

ing lessons rom the campaign, Rospars and

Graham-Felson say, was that people wanted

longer cuts. In the beginning we were just

posting clips, but people kept commenting

they wanted the whole thing, Rospars says.The campaigns most successul YouTube

videohis 37-minute speech on race in

Philadelphia in March 2008was watched

by around eight million people online, ar

more than saw it live on television.

the weB aS UNIqUe

OrgaNIzINg tOOl

Beyond message, mobilization and money

came into play. The campaign careully

used tiered ladders o engagement to

encourage supporters to take on more

responsibility or donate more. MyBO

eatured a wealth o organizing tools

not generally even available in previous

campaigns to paid sta, let alone to any

sel-motivated supporter. But by the end

o the campaign some two million people

had set up accounts on MyBO, enabling

them to blog on the site. It also provided

eatures that let supporters generate lists

o uncommitted voters to call rom home

and create canvas lists to knock on doors,

as well as generate their own undraising

goals among their riends and amily. Such

inormation had never been made so pub-

licly accessible by a campaign beore; the

campaign realized that the value it gained

in distributing normally closely-held voter

contact inormation ar and wide morethan outweighed any traditional tendency

to protect the crown jewels.

About MyBO, Chris Hughes draws an

important distinction: We really [thought] o

this as an organizing network, not as a social

network. I they wanted to contribute to a

blog or a group listserv, thats great, but thats

not what we were building this towards.

By signing up on MyBO, anyone who

organized a house party or Obama got a

phone call rom an Obama organizerand

i they lived in a battleground state, they

got a ace-to-ace meeting with an orga-

nizer beore the event. In that ace-to-ace,

the organizer prepped the house-party

host on language, gave them campaign

supplies, and generally worked to make the

supporter eel intimately connected to the

campaign. Rather than organize by pre-

cinct, as most campaigns do, the campaign

sta relied on Obama teams, grouping

precincts together to build small groups

who worked together online and ofine to

activate social networks, build house par-

ties, and reach undecided voters across a

small area. Online volunteer organizing

essentially built the campaign a structurein places where it didnt exist, letting paid

sta parachute in and immediately take

command o a working political army,

explains Colin Delaney o Epolitics.com.

In South Carolina, where Obama blew

away Hillary Clintonand where even her

state campaign chair Don Fowler admit-

ted Obama had organized the state like

never beoremore than 10,000 volunteers

made at least three contacts with every

Arican-American voter in the state. This

neighbor-to-neighbor outreach driven by

MyBO, explains Jeremy Bird, the organizer


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COMMAnd O A wORk-Ing POLItICAL ARMy.



7/9

or the state, was unprecedented: No cam-

paign Ive ever been on has been able to do

that. We were told over and over that South

Carolina isnt a eld state. Every state is a

eld state i you do it right.

Despite these well-orchestrated suc-

cesses, there were still a ew surprises. In

early August 2007, in a rare unprepared

moment, the campaign was ooded by

tens o thousands o birthday wishes on

Facebook and MySpace as Obamas August

4th birthday approached. Sta spent hours

responding to each one they could.

OBaMa OrgaNIzINg FellOwS

Nationally, more than 10,000 people applied

to become one o 3,000 Obama Organiz-ing Fellows, who were given three days o

training and then turned loose in a commu-

nity. Fellows in Atlanta managed to register

1,200 new voters in a single day. The data

rom each o these eorts ed back up

through the campaign databases all the way

to organizers like Bird and campaign leaders

like Ploue, who had access to sophisticated

dashboards to track activity. Organizers like

Bird could access automated activity reports

sent right to their BlackBerrys, which

helped ensure that comments rom grass-

roots activists got read by campaign leaders.

The marathon battle between Hillary

Clinton and Barack Obama in state causes

and primaries across the nation in 2008

helped lay the groundwork or Obamas

all victory. Campaign insiders believe this

seemingly-endless season was one o the

best things that happened to the campaign;

it allowed them to build grassroots networks

across the country, sign up volunteers, and

test out eld operations in every state long

beore the November general election, thus

allowing them to rene tools, data col-

lection, and reporting. Blue State worked

continuously to integrate the campaignsmain database with its voter les, run by

Obamas Voter Action Network (VAN).

I youre in the eld, having access to

what types o interactions theyve had

with the campaigns online is really help-

ul, Franklin-Hodge explains. The VAN

system, lled with highly-rened records

on over 200 million Americans eligible

to vote, allowed the campaign to create

custom walk- and door-knock lists, as

well as manage volunteers. Depending on

access rights, everyone rom local precinct

organizers to campaign manager Ploue

could view reams o statistics on actions

and tool usage. Particularly powerul were

the tools that allowed disaggregated phone

banking and let people make telephone

calls rom home on their own time. Using

the Blue State phone-banking tool, Obama

supporters made more than three million

phone calls online in the last our days o

the campaign alone.

CIvIC StrUCtUre: BrINgINg all eF-

FOrtS tOgether vIa the weB

The campaign directly attributed its

success in the February 5, 2008 Super

Tuesday primaries and caucuses, which

provided the lead that Hillary Clinton

ound insurmountable, to its onlineorganizing: Obama won big in places like

Wyoming where there werent many paid

sta but there were sel-organized groups

that had been at work or a year.

Groups in Arizona and New Mexico

were canvassing undecided voters by

August o last year using lists generated

through MyBO. This was way beore

real sta were dropping into the states,

Graham-Felson says. It wasnt just about

putting sta in, it was giving people the

capacity to organize themselves.

Over the course o the campaign, more

than two m illion people opened proles

on MyBO and organized some 200,000

ofine events. Some 35,000 dierent vol-

unteer groups ormed across the country

and even abroad among groups o Ameri-

can ex-pats. Those eorts in turn helped

generate spontaneous, sel-organized

events like the Bridges or Obama

movementwhere Obama supporters

gathered on bridge spans across the globe

and snapped photos o themselves (Google

Bridges or Obama or a taste)which

led to thousands o similar events.

The Obama campaign made the great-est investment in this civic structure,

says organizing guru Marshall Ganz, who

worked with the campaign. Its very

important to distinguish between car-

penters and tools. The investment in this

campaign o creating skilled carpenters

was what enabled them to use the tools

as well as they did. As Ganz explains,

it was this tight integration between all

platorms that helped power the Obama

campaign: Saul Alinsky said there are

two orces o power: organized power

and organized money. Obama managed to

Volunteerscompete online toBoost rankings

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8/9

gure out how to do both. It was, ater

all, the strength and breadth o Obamas

online movement that provided the justi-

cation or his campaign.

In June 2007, just ve months ater

Obama entered the race and more than

seven months beore the rst primar y

votes, the campaign demonstrated its

organizing chops with a 50-state Walk or

Change event that spawned 2,400 events

across the country. Using MyBO and the

campaign database, Obama or America

careully tracked and recorded what each

supporter on MyBO had done: how many

telephone calls they placed, how many

events they attended, and how much

money they donated and raised.Hildebrand says the campaign learned

rom Howard Dean in 2004 that the Inter-

net alone wont win an election, but that by

marrying the ofine and online components,

the campaign could create an unbeat-

able orce. They constantly exploited this

wisdom: As the campaign learned that its

supporters broadly ell into two categories

those who made hundreds o voter contacts

and those who made around 10 (with not

many in between)the Obama machine

tweaked its tools to make sure that those

rst 10 were real neighbors. I youre only

making 10 calls, its better to make them

to the people on your street than to people

anywhere in the country, Hughes says.

And in the summer o 2008, when thecampaign planned more than 1,000 meet-

ings across the country to generate ideas

or inclusion in the Democratic National

Committee platorm, it didnt send a blast

email; instead it combed its database or

those people most interested in policy and

targeted them or emails asking them to

host a party or attend a partybut that was

only ater rst reaching out to its 50,000

core organizers who had previously hosted

events to get them to prepopulate the site

and organize events. And when it came

to registering voters, more than nine mil-

lion phone calls were made via the online

phone-banking tools on MyBO. Those

eorts worked in concert with the cam-

paigns online voter registration project,

VoteForChange.com. Launched only in

September 2008, it registered more than

700,000 in a matter o weeks.

daNglINg the BaIt; COlleCtINg Cell

phONe NUMBerS

Perhaps the single best example o the

campaigns ability to pull all the tools

together came during the Biden announce-

ment. In its largest eort, the campaign

encouraged supporters to sign up or text

messages to be the rst to learn o Obamas

running-mate selectionan eort that,campaign insiders admitwas more about

collecting cell phone numbers to call or

text on election day as part o its get-out-

the-vote eorts than it was about breaking

news in an appealing new way. The text

message read, Barack has chosen Senator

Joe Biden to be our VP nominee. Watch

the rst Obama-Biden rally live at 3pm

ET on www.BarackObama.com. Spread

the word! Because o its technology

inrastructure, the campaign could direct

viewers right to the campaign website,

rather than CNN or one o the networks,

which meant that it controlled the entire

event coverageand could put a big donate

button right next to the webcast. Once on

the site, visitors could sign up to volunteer,get more involved, read more about Sen.

Joe Biden, or, even later, view text o the

announcement speech.

By contrast, McCains campaign dis-

cussed the same strategy and rejected

it as beneath a presidential candidate.

Mired in tools and strategies that might

have worked in previous campaigns, the

McCain campaign sent only a single text

message during the whole campaigna

reminder the day beore the election. The

Obama campaign, on the other hand, built

a list o more than three million cell phone

numbers and then, in the days leading up

to the general election, sent targeted texts

to supporters based on their zip codes with

inormation about where to vote and how

to get more inormation.

pUllINg OUt all StOpS FOr

the raCe SpeeCh

Prior to Obamas critical March 18, 2008,

speech on race in Philadelphia, the cam-

paign also pulled out all stops, promoting

the event with emails, text messages, blogs,

the campaign website, social networking

sites, and YouTube. Aterwards, the ull-

length speech, all 37 minutes o it, became

the campaigns most-watched video o

the electionsome eight million peoplewatched it online, vastly more than saw

it live on television. Donation and sign-up

windows linked to the speech on BarackO-

bama.com helped capture supporters

enthusiasm and encouraged eedback;

more than 10,000 people let comments

about the speech on YouTube.

zerOINg IN wIth SOMe 7,000

UNIqUe eMaIlS

The campaign worked hard ne-tuning its

ability to hone in on just those most likely

to attend each event. The overall opt-in

email list ended up at more than 13 mil-

lion, though rarely did the entire list get

the same email at the same time. For one

thing, the campaign tracked when peopletended to open their email and segmented

the list accordinglyi you tended to be an

early-morning email reader, youd get it

then; i you had a record o opening email

late in the day, youd get it then. More than

that, though, the campaign used its vast

database to continually rene interests and

preerences. I you donated $25, the next

email might ask or $50; i you gave $50,

you might get an email asking or $100. And

i you made telephone calls, you might get

an email asking you to host a house party.

All told, the campaign created some 7,000


HILdebRAnd sAys tHe CAMPAIgn LeARned ROM HOwARd deAn In2004 tHAt tHe InteRnet ALOne wOnt wIn An eLeCtIOn, but tHAtby MARRyIng tHe OLIne And OnLIne COMPOnents,tHe CAMPAIgnCOuLd CReAte An unbeAtAbLe ORCe.



9/9

dierent versions o targeted emails. That

tiered ladder helped push supporters to

get more involved at every step. While the

average number o donations per contribu-

tor was just over two, tens o thousands

donated many times. The Obama campaign

reused to release specics about its donor

breakdown. But it is known that o the 6.5

million total donations made online, six

million were under $100.

The volume o communications with

supporters rom Obama or America was

unprecedented. Blue State, which pro-

cessed the campaigns email, sent over

a billion emails during the course o the

campaign. To do so, Blue State relied on its

custom-built, proprietary email systemwhich it recreated several times to handle

ever-increasing mail volumes. They

understood that no one had ever done

what they were trying to do. There wasnt

something o-the-shel that was just [put]

to work, says Franklin-Hodge.

three MIllION eMaIlS per hOUr

While at the beginning o the campaign,

Blue State was able to send 200,000 emails

an hour, by the end o the campaign,

upgrades allowed them to churn out three

million per hourwhich still meant that

it took more than our hours to send the

rare email that went out to the entire

list. Franklin-Hodge says hes unaware

o any system in the world thats more

robust, adding, We made what was to me

a stunning a mount o headway on those

problems in this cycle. To send email, the

campaign turned to a Web portal set up by

Blue State whereby they could select any

o more than 50 dierent ways to segment

the list by a wide range o criteria such

as zip code, donation level, willingness

to host a house party, voter registration

status, or an expressed interest in a policytopic like the environment.

the New paradIgM

While Obamas technology eorts were

certainly unprecedented, campaign

strategists say they dont believe they did

anything shockingly revolutionary. They

took existing toolsmany o which are

now our or ve years oldand merely

integrated them better than their prede-

cessors and opponents. Post-campaign,

Blue State has been ooded by requests

rom candidates around the world or Web

help. As Rospars says, In 2004, everyone

said Howard Deans online success was an

exception. Now theyre saying the same

about Obama. Sooner or later, people will

realize these cant just be exceptions. The

essence o it is replicable in almost any

environment.

The best technology, however, will not help

the wrong candidate. The idea that Obama,

like Ghandi, King, Mandela, or the other

leaders on his Senate oce wall stood in the

vanguard o a national call or change was

what gave heart and soul to his undertaking.

He was able to justiy his own candidacy

through the movement it createdI may be

young and traditionally inexperienced or the

presidency, he seemed to be saying, yet this

mass movement is calling on me to lead them

(and us) orward.

What President Obama does with the

technology platorm and movement that

grew up around candidate Obama is still

an open question. As ormer Howard Dean

campaign manager Joe Trippi says, In 2004,

we were the Wright Brothers and compared

to us, Obamas campaign was the Apollo

moon shot. Now that hes in the White

House, though, hes back to being the Wright

brothersthe rst networked president.

However, there are already signs o how

the Obama White House will be dierent:The president has won the ght to hold onto

his cherished BlackBerry, and during the

debate over the economic stimulus bill in his

rst weeks in oce, he rallied his email list

to host house parties to discuss the pro-

posed legislation; more than 3,000 people

heeded the call and hosted events.

garrett m. graFF, an editor at Washingtonianmagazine, is the author o The First Campaign: Globaliza-

tion, the Web, and the Race or the White House. In 2004,he worked on Vermont Gov. Howard Deans presidential

campaign and, prior to that, was Gov. Deans frst webmaster.


adVertisingon google,texting, androlling in dough

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barack obama how content management and web 2 0 helped win the white house

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