Using social media to drive government policy - President Obama vs Goldman Sachs

Using the media to build public opinion pressure against an opponent is one of the oldest tactics in the political playbook.

However in the modern world politicians and organisations can go one better - marshalling their social networking followers and using social media avenues to directly build and channel public opinion.

While we've not seen much of this in Australia (though perhaps the Prime Minister's National Health and Hospitals Network Facebook Cause page is an example of early steps), the President's office in the USA is becoming quite mature and strategically effective at this type of pressure.

A short time ago President Obama used his social media platforms, including 8 million Facebook followers and millions of supporters via the MyBarackObama site (now referred to as Organising for America) to successfully lobby for the US Health Reform bill.

More recently the President has used his online muscle to launch a campaign against Goldman Sachs - a campaign that seems to have left the company off-balance and reeling.

Covered last week in the Forbes magazine article Obama Fights Goldman With Social Media, the President has used search engine marketing directed to Organising for America combined with a coordinated campaign via Facebook and Twitter (where the President has 3 million followers) to build public support for changes to the US's financial systems, specifically focused at Goldman.

The campaign has been even more effective because Goldman has a negligible social media presence and is not able to respond effectively through social networking channels - a major warning for any organisation, or government department, facing a determined and highly coordinated attempt to shift public opinion online.

As the article states,

To date, Goldman's silence in the online space has been deafening--making it all the easier for regulators, legislators and the White House to paint a bull's eye on its back.

I hope no Australian government department will allow itself to be in this position.

For those who are not fully across the social media strategy used by the US President in his election campaign, a good piece to read is Viralblog's The Full Barack Obama Social Media Strategy!. I've embedded the presentation linked to that article below.

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Are you a citizen of Australia, New Zealand, the US, the UK, Google or Facebook? Blurring governments and companies

Many people consider Google as a search engine, or maybe as a search and email system, with a few extra frills like maps.

However with over 1 billion searches a day, Google is not only aggregating the world's knowledge, it is learning about the world's citizens, what interests them, how they think and feel - even how well they are. It is now becoming possible to track the spread of diseases via Google searches with a high degree of accuracy, or model political sentiment.

These techniques are still in their infancy, however over time Google is building mental maps for billions of the world's citizens. The company is hiring the best and brightest engineers, mathematicians and psychologists in the world in order to make more sense of this data and improve their predictions - apparently to help improve the targeting of advertisements.

Google is also a more complex entity than it first appears in the clean Google search interface. The company is involved in a vast array of businesses connected to how the internet operates, is powered and the services delivered across it, such as power generation, broadband networks, connection devices and operation systems, electronic healthcare and biotechnology. In many respects the company is heading towards becoming a global operating system for the planet.

Alongside Google is Facebook - the world's leading social networking site. However rather than just being a place to chat with your friends online and share photos, Facebook has much grander ambitions.

Facebook now has almost 500 million active users - more than half accessing it daily. The service's users spend more time engaging with and through the service than they spend engaging with their national and state governments.

Facebook's advertising engine learns every time a user interacts with the service and even learns about people who do not have accounts by how they are mentioned in photos, videos and updates by users. This makes it a tool for achieving the same depth of audience understanding as Google is developing through its search and other services.

Last week Facebook and Microsoft launched a partnership which will allow Facebook users to create, edit, share and collaborate on documents via Microsoft's new web-based Office back end. The site is Docs.com. This isn't the traditional tool you find in a social network and could herald Facebook's entry into business life.

Also last week Facebook launched the Open Graph initiative that could see them embedding roots into many - if not most - websites, by enabling people to embed Facebook 'Like' buttons which connect back to their Facebook profiles. More than simply being a way to share your sentiment with friends, these buttons allow Facebook to know when you visit every site with a Like button, what you do and how long you spend there. Like a benevolent strangler vine, Facebook will suck knowledge about its users (including around 40% of Australians) out of potentially millions of websites in the most comprehensive data collection and reuse scheme in history - again apparently focused on ad sales.

In the past companies with this level of influence and control over a geographical territory amassed enormous political power. In some cases they effectively became the government in some areas of the world. The British East India Company springs to mind, which governed much of India for 100 years.

As the world becomes reliant on the internet as the global nervous system, where the territory is owned by companies rather than nations, I wonder whether we will see a similar situation with the potential for companies becoming governments - all but in name.

At some point will people consider themselves citizens of Google or Facebook rather than Australia, New Zealand or Great Britain?

Maybe some already do.


Below is an excellent video by the ABC's Hungry Beast that provides more information about what's under the hood at Google, and speculates about what the company could become.

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What would you do if you had unlimited funds to spend on your department's online presence?

Everyone who runs a website dreams of what they would do if they had more funds to spend on improving their online presence.

I've been doing some thinking around this lately as a thought exercise around building priority lists for what needs to be done to strengthen my department's online presence.

I always come back to strengthening base infrastructure first. Ensuring that our own staff have the best tools for their tasks, including high-powered computers, the right software, effective and fully implemented content management and reporting systems, appropriate connections between data and publishing to enable a consistent approach to openness and transparency and, very importantly, that all the staff concerned have the training and support to use all of these systems effectively and to their full potential.

Next for me is strengthening governance and management, doing what is necessary to ensure my department has all of the appropriate governance and standards in place to operate a current, flexible and responsive online presence - including outreach activities to third party websites. blogs, forums and social networks.

Third I look at capability building. Putting in place the systems and functionality that extends the basic infrastructure to allow the department to manage emerging needs.

Interspersed amongst the priorities above are the staffing required to deliver what is needed and redevelopment of websites and tools as required to ensure our online presence meets the needs of our audiences, stakeholders and the government.


Given that funding is not unlimited for most online managers, the next step is to consider what can be done within budget constrains. It's important to also look at which pieces can be funded from other budgets (such as staff training) or whether additional funds can be requested to meet legislative or campaign requirements or as part of modernisation initiatives.

While it's not possible to do everything you want, there is often quite a bit you can actually achieve if you're prepared to spend the time educating decision-makers, liaising with other business areas and building the business cases needed to source funds.

So if you were given a blank cheque, what would you prioritise?

And given that you are unlikely to have one, what will you choose to actually achieve?

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Voting polls in virtual places - World of Warcraft

With over 11 million active players, World of Warcraft is one of the largest massive multiplayer online games in the world. In fact if it were a country it would be 75th - just behind Zimbabwe and ahead of Rwanda.

Back before the 2007 US Presidential election, a small study was carried out amongst US World of Warcraft players to see whether they'd vote for Republican nominee McCain, or Democrat candidate Obama.

While tongue-in-cheek, it provides an interesting insight into how it may be possible in the future to poll large numbers of Australians online to gather intelligence about voting preferences or satisfaction levels.

What was the outcome?

About 85% of Horde players said they intended to vote for Barack Obama, with McCain doing best amongst Night Elves, where 10% supported him. However the Allied vote was split, with the two candidates tied for the Human vote and McCain winning the Dwarf vote 33% to 22%, with 22% undecided and 33% saying other.

By player class, Obama won all except the Warrior and Priest votes, polling strongest amongst Shamans and Rogues.

Overall 62% of World of Warcraft players indicated they would vote for Obama (admittedly much more than the 53% he won in the actual election).

Below is the video.

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Launching banknotes via online video

In what I believe is a world first, the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing has launched its new US$100 note, featuring Benjamin Franklin, via an online video in YouTube.

Brought to my attention by Nicholas Gruen, the 82 second long production provides a clear view of all the security provisions included in the banknote.

There is also an interactive video quiz available for people who wish to learn about how to recognise the note.

The approach offers an innovative vision as to how countries around the world could market and communicate the features of their currency and stamps to their citizens.

Benjamin Franklin, as a former printer and scientist (one of the early pioneers in electricity), would have been proud.

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