eObama - the US Presidential election goes digital

I've been watching the campaign for the Democratic nomination for the US presidency with 'shock and awe'.

This has been the first election to see social media become a significant factor in the outcome - even (in many commentators' opinions) the deciding factor.

There has been very little coverage of this in Australia and I'm not sure how aware many Australians are at the high degree of impact the online channel has had on the outcome.

However in the US and in the UK the shift in election focus from presentation to participation has been widely discussed and dissected.

Leading commentators have compared it to the shift in the 1960s when television first became a factor in US politics and Kennedy demolished Nixon in a televised debate - not because he made better points, but because he presented better on camera.

...the Obama campaign has shattered the top-down, command-and-control, broadcast-TV model that has dominated American politics since the early 1960s.

"They have taken the bottom-up campaign and absolutely perfected it," says Joe Trippi, who masterminded [Democrat candidate Howard] Dean's Internet campaign in 2004. "It's light-years ahead of where we were four years ago. They'll have 100,000 people in a state who have signed up on their Web site and put in their zip code. Now, paid organizers can get in touch with people at the precinct level and help them build the organization bottom up. That's never happened before. It never was possible before."

The Machinery of Hope - Rolling Stone Magazine (20/03/2008)

How Barack Obama won the online market
Barack Obama's staff - led by one of the founders of Facebook - developed the my.barackobama.com website before he announced his nomination. This site combined all the elements of social media, election-style.

It allowed grass-root supporters to organise local precinct and state-based support chapters, create mailing lists, develop websites, blogs and online forums.

This led to the formation of hundreds of local groups, who were able to organise and mobilise rapidly and, while organised outside the campaign machine, could be co-ordinated with it when Obama's paid campaign workers arrived in an area ahead of a vote.

The site also spearheaded the donations machine for the campaign. It allowed the creation and division of phone lists, contained pre-developed scripts for supporters (to cold call people for donations) and naturally allows people to make donations directly from the home page.

As a result Obama raised a record sum of over US$270 million in donations at last count to support his campaign,. This is roughly US$50 million more than Clinton (whose campaign now owes about US$20 million) - see Open Secrets for the details of funds raised.

Remember that when Obama announced he would run Clinton was the clear front-runner. He has come from a long way behind to take the nomination, enabled by his powerful online organisation.

So how was this all kept a secret during the campaign?

It wasn't. Below are a selection of articles dissecting Obama's online machine and, in many cases, providing details of its inner workings.

• Politics 2.008 - American Journalism Review (June/July 2007)
• Obama Campaign Masters Digital Media While McCain Efforts are "Old and Clunky" - JackMyers.com (10/06/2008)
• The 21st Century Election - PoliticsOnline (04/06/2008)
• Barack Obama is master of the new Facebook politics - Times Online (25/05/2008)
• Internet key to Obama victories - BBC (22/05/2008)
• Will the US election be won on Facebook? - CNN (01/05/2008)
• Barack Obama is Rocking the Youth Vote - SearchEngineWatch (17/04/2008)
• The revolution will not be televised - Tokblog (April 2008)
• The Machinery of Hope - Rolling Stone Magazine (20/03/2008)
• How Barack Obama is Using Web and Enterprise 2.0 in the US Primary Campaign Through Central Desktop - Portals and KM (05/03/2008)
• Obama's Web Marketing triumph - Fortune Magazine (03/03/2008)
• Inside Obama's surging Net-roots campaign - Wired Magazine (03/03/08)
• Democrat Barack Obama: 2008 Presidential Candidates & Online Marketing Strategies - Search Marketing Gurus (08/01/2008)
• Barack Obama, Social Networking King - Washington Post (06/10/2007)

So if all of this was known - why didn't Clinton copy and improve on it?

The simple answer is that Obama's campaign was run by Digital Natives - people brought up using the internet or who understand and make use of it's amazing potential as a way to connect and empower individuals at the grassroots, organise and co-ordinate resources and create new paths to solve old problems.

Clinton's campaign staff were focused on traditional, tried-and-true command and control ways of running campaigns and simply did not have the capacity to change mindsets in time to stop the Obama juggernaut.

Traditional media is based on command and control. But the digital world is all about grassroots. Traditional media is about authority. Digital is about authenticity.

You can see it in the language they use. Obama uses the language of "we and you," which is inclusive and nods to the wisdom of the crowds. She [Clinton] uses "I and me." His stuff is about "yes, you can." Which is about the buyer. She talks about "experience from day one." That's about the seller. That doesn't resonate anymore.

Obama's Web Marketing triumph - Fortune Magazine (03/03/2008)

I wonder which politician or organisation will next be able to replicate Obama's success?

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Did you blog today?

Blogging cannot really be seen as a fringe activity anymore, with over 112 million blogs in existence around the world (as counted by Technorati, the world's leading blog tracker).

Within this number there are a number of blogs written by senior executives, public officials and politicians.

However these 'official' blogs are rarer than hen's teeth in Australia.


This article, brought to my attention by Smartbrief (one of my favourite enewsletters), provides a great deal of information on the reasons why senior executives and public officials should be blogging, and the benefits they can bring to an organisation.

Have you written your blog today?
Lots of CEOs and senior execs are blogging as a way to communicate with employees -- and increase search engine rankings. Pundits say "blogs help disseminate a company's message, answer public criticism and develop a relationship between the public and the company's most visible figures." KansasCity.com/Detroit Free Press (6/3)

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Should government agencies websites still be designed with 800x600 monitor resolutions in mind?

Every time I have redesigned a website or intranet over the last 12 years I have asked the question of what is the minimum monitor resolution we need to support for customers.

I was very glad when we could stop catering for 640x480 resolution and make the new minimum 800x600.

Since then each time I check I have still found a dedicated minority of users (down to around 2-3% now) still on 800x600 resolution monitors.

Over the past three years I've seen a number of major sites move to 1024x768 as the minimum resolution (including most news media sites) - for a large commercial entity it may make sense to abandon the few remaining 800x600 users to focus on their more lucrative audiences.

With today's computers starting with a default resolution of 1024x768, the users still on 800x600 are most likely to be older, have poor vision or a vintage computer. They may be using internet access in public areas or simply not have the knowledge or confidence to change their monitor resolution.

These are the people most likely to draw on government services, so my conclusion is that government agencies cannot leave these people behind.

However if government has a commitment to serving all citizens it must also ensure that the other 90%+ of people are well catered for. Presenting a fixed 800x600 site, or even an expanding site which simply increases the whitespace at higher resolutions doesn't provide additional value for the majority of users.

It could be considered reverse discrimination - limiting citizens who own modern computers and have good eyesight to basic 800x600 pixels worth of information at a time.

So my view is that while government agencies must support 800x600, they must also seriously consider adaptive designs through the use of css (Cascading Style Sheets) - a standard HTML tool - to present better designed and more effective websites for the majority of citizens.

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Effective use of government mapping data

This is a great presentation on exploiting location-based information, following on from my post on mashups.

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Baby steps into extranets

When I joined the public service a few years back I was very pleased to discover that my agency was very proactive about engaging stakeholders when creating products and services for our customers.

The agency was still using 20th century methods to achieve these outcomes and was making no use of online collaborative groups or extranets.

This isn't a criticism of the people or the systems - the agency had developed the skills to manage this collaboration using the readily available technologies - email, mail, phones, faxes and face-to-face meetings. Since these were working well there had not been the need or money available to innovate new ways of engaging.

However over the last few years the tempo has accelerated.

The agency has placed a greater focus on stakeholder consultation, the level and complexity of engagement has increased and there has been the need to involve more players in approval processes. At the same time the agency has needed to manage its staffing levels carefully.

When most types of system double in size the effort required to manage and maintain them increases much more than double. This is because the connections between the different parts of the system increase exponentially.

For example, if you draw four dots on a piece of paper they can be connected in 6 possible ways (3+2+1), however 8 dots can be connected in 28 possible ways (7+6+5+4+3+2+1).

While it could be argued that as all these extra stakeholders deal with the agency as the central organiser the complexity doesn't increase that much - theoretically all these interactions can be fed into a central point at the agency, like spokes on a wheel.

However in reality the interactions between the stakeholders are an important factor and this is where all the additional potential connections come into play.

So with increasing need, increasing complexity and fixed or diminishing resources an important questions becomes;

How does the agency manage this on an ongoing basis - and do so cost-effectively?

This is where my Online Communications Team been able to add value to the process. We've worked with the stakeholder managers to introduce an approach that is both freely available and totally government approved - an online collaborative wiki.

We've established two collaborative communities for my agency using the Govdex platform provided by AGIMO. This wiki-based system is secure, readily configurable to agency needs, has support available and is free to use by government departments. Best of all it's easy for the relevant groups in the agency to manage themselves, with my team simply providing back up and account managing the Govdex relationship.

As we're in early days yet and learning as we go, the two communities we've established are internally focused. One is supporting the ongoing development of our intranet and helping the agency's online team understand the capabilities of such a system (so we can stay a few steps ahead of other users).

The other is a knowledgebase and discussion forum for the agency's stakeholder engagement officers across Australia. This is the prototype for a future system for engaging with our stakeholders across the country.

The experience of setting up these systems has been largely painless. Other than some issues with the access speed within our firewall, which appear to be due to government networks not playing nice with each other and are rapidly being resolved, our Govdex experience has begun as a positive one.

I'd particularly like to commend the customer service provided by Govdex - they have helped us get the sites up and running in record time.

I'm now in the process of beginning to promote Govdex as a business tool within my agency so that anyone who has the need to deal with a set of internal and external stakeholders can consider it as a potential solution to their communication and collaboration needs.

Note that Govdex and similar online collaboration systems aren't a replacement for face-to-face meetings, phone calls or emails, but they are another tool that can be used to facilitate and manage complex collaboration situations in a cost-effective manner.

By the way - here's a great presentation on GovDex from the Web Directions Government conference on May 19 2008 - Ralph Douglas - GovDex: Collaborating online in a secure environment

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