The World Wide Webbed: The Obama Campaign’s Masterful Use of the Internet

Just as President Barack Obama has shaken up the status quo in his first 100 days in office, his campaign overturned old formulas about how to win the presidency. The Obama campaign did not focus only on battleground states, but instead charged into states that previously had been solidly Republican turf. With a historic economic collapse unfolding during the final months of the election, a crucial number of swing voters voted, not necessarily for Obama, but against the Republicans and the Bush administration, and in the process transformed the ‘Red vs. Blue’ political map. In the post-World War II period, American voters have tended to throw out the incumbent party every eight years, so at this stage, no political analyst can say if this transformation will prove to be deep and wide or is merely a temporary changing of the guard. But no question Team Obama has, to some extent, rewritten the campaign playbook, and future campaigns will be measured against this trendsetter.

One of the winning campaign strategies masterfully deployed by the Obama campaign was its use of the internet. More than any other previous campaign, the Obama campaign showed the tremendous mobilizing and fundraising potential of a comprehensive internet strategy. Some are saying that Obama’s use of this still relatively new medium will change American politics the way John F. Kennedy’s use of television did. But it remains to be seen if a less charismatic candidate without a wind of change blowing through an electorate buffeted by economic crisis can replicate Obama’s success.

Nevertheless, what the Obama campaign accomplished using the internet was stunningly impressive. Despite the United States lagging in broadband access compared to Europe or Japan, both in terms of the number of people with fast, affordable broadband access and the speed of the connections, the Obama campaign used the internet to organize his supporters in a way that in the past would have required an army of volunteers and paid organizers on the ground. This not only helped him in the November election against the Republican nominee John McCain, but was probably the decisive factor in his Democratic primary contest against Hillary Clinton. Both the Clinton and McCain campaigns used the internet to reach voters, but Obama mastered the medium early and exploited it brilliantly. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that without the internet, Barack Obama would not have won the Democratic primary, and would not have been elected President.

The Big Mo: Internet Mobilization and Social Networking

In the primary season, both the fundraising and the mobilizing potential of the internet provided key advantages for Obama. His campaign started from scratch early in 2007 with few resources and little name recognition, but the internet helped him connect to his core supporters in cost-effective ways. Many of his campaign’s early efforts were low-overhead strategies that utilized free resources. His nimble use of the internet helped him overcome the huge initial lead of Hillary Clinton in both fundraising and perceived viability. He was able to get more local volunteers on the ground in key states earlier than the Clinton campaign, which was especially important in smaller states and caucus states. And his early success soon generated a wave of small-size campaign contributions which eventually gave him a crucial advantage in campaign organization and advertising over the Clinton campaign, which also raised a large sum of money but mainly from large donors.

Veteran campaign strategist Joe Trippi, who ran the Howard Dean campaign for President in 2004, says, ‘the tools [for elections] changed between 2004 and 2008. Barack Obama won every single caucus state that matters, and he did it because of those tools, because he was able to move thousands of people to organize.’

With a charismatic leader out front, the Obama campaign especially was able to connect with young people, roughly 18 to 29 years old, the cohort known as the millennials, who will outnumber the baby boomers by 2010. Young people were attracted to him by his early opposition to the war in Iraq, as well as his personal ‘audacity of hope’ story, allowing him to mobilize their energy and passion. Says Chris Hughes, the Obama campaign’s director of online organizing, ‘the community that elected Obama raised more money, held more events, made more phone calls, shared more videos, and offered more policy suggestions than any in history. It also delivered more votes.’

The Obama campaign centrally involved the internet from the very beginning. BarackObama.com featured constant updates, videos, photos, ringtones, widgets, and events to give supporters a reason to come back to the site. More than any previous campaign, they took advantage of the still-developing interactive Web 2.0 tools and their social networking capabilities, deploying them as a vehicle for generating excitement among a vast online community.When he officially declared his candidacy in February 2007, his campaign launched MyBarackObama.com, a social networking site in which 2 million profiles and 35,000 volunteer groups eventually were created, and 200,000 off-line events planned. Later that spring, the campaign took over a grassroots Obama fan page on MySpace with 160,000 followers. It created Obama profiles on a dozen social networks, from BlackPlanet to AsianAve. On Facebook, Obama fan groups eventually grew to 3.2 million supporters. Those are staggering numbers, an extraordinary level of engagement, especially among the youth.

On MyBarackObama.com, Obamaniacs could create their own blogs around platform issues, send policy recommendations directly to the campaign, set up their own mini fundraising site, organize an event, even use a phonebank widget to get call lists and scripts to tele-canvass from home. All the campaigns also used something called ‘online behavioral targeting’, but Obama’s team was more effective. When a prospective voter navigated to one of the candidate’s sites, a ‘cookie’ or internet tag, was placed in that user’s web browser. That cookie could identify the types of sites the user visited afterward, helping inform which political ads were served up to the user. Before, candidates had to rely on stereotyping large swaths of voters and making TV spots to suit. But in the 2008 election they were able to literally formulate an ad campaign for each individual voter. Obama’s campaign was smart about segmenting its supporters, crafting different methods of communication for each group. With younger voters, for instance, they made use of text messaging; for older voters, they sent short, concise emails. With an email or a text every few days, people were kept abreast of the latest news and talking points without the costly expenses of TV ads or direct mailings.

Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, a website that explores how technology is changing politics says, ‘if you think about the fact that they have cell phone numbers, emails, blog comments, donations and MyBarackObama profiles and so forth, they have multiple levels of data about their supporters. Let us say they then take that data and mash it with voter files, for example. They find someone who visits BarackObama.com every day, has given them $10 a month for the last few months, has offered their mobile phone number, has voted in Democratic primaries for the last 12 years. That is probably someone who would be willing to volunteer for them.’ And out goes an email and text message to each individual about volunteering, with specific locations near their home or work. With online campaigning, Raseij says, ‘you can see where you get traction, and then reinvest, based on data.’

Making Your Own Media Machine

The Obama campaign also masterfully used the World Wide Web and its emerging video capabilities for promoting its own message, for rebutting criticisms, and for circumventing the monopoly of the mainstream media in defining candidates. The first inkling of the ability of the web to grab attention for the Obama campaign was revealed rather innocuously in June 2007 when an independently-developed YouTube video of ‘I got a crush on Obama’ was posted by a buxomly clad Obama Girl, eventually garnering 12 million views. It was a huge sensation that drew attention to his campaign early on.

That was just the first example of the Obama campaign as well as his millions of supporters taking advantage of YouTube for free advertising and message broadcasting. The ‘Yes We Can’ mashup by the Black Eyed Peas’ will.i.am, starring a handful of his famous friends, cost the campaign nothing and became a viral hit. The Obama campaign’s own YouTube channel turned out 1800 videos by election day, reaping 110 million views. Joe Trippi argues that those videos were more effective than television ads because viewers chose to watch them or received them from a friend instead of having their television shows interrupted.

‘The campaign’s official stuff they created for YouTube was watched for 14.5 million hours’ Mr. Trippi said. ‘To buy 14.5 million hours on broadcast TV is $47 million.’ Yet the Obama campaign paid next to nothing for that widespread exposure on the web.

The internet also let people repeatedly listen to the candidates’ own words in the face of attacks. Instead of being at the mercy of Fox News and its spin zone, Obama could react nearly instantaneously and have more impact on the public discourse. There was no better example of this than the controversy over Obama’s friendship with the Reverend Jeremiah White. While Obama’s opponents found ways to make sure that Reverend Wright’s incendiary words kept surfacing, people could watch and re-watch Mr. Obama’s speech on race. They could forward links to their own friends and associates. Eventually nearly 7 million people watched Obama’s 37-minute speech on YouTube, and the mainstream media reported on it in part because it became such an internet sensation. ‘[The Obama campaign] leapfrogged the mainstream media by producing content that they knew would get distributed for them once it was uploaded’, says Arianna Huffington, creator and publisher of HuffingtonPost.com.

There has also been a sea change in fact-checking, with citizens using the internet to find past speeches that prove a politician wrong and then using the web to alert their fellow citizens. The John McCain campaign, for example, originally said that Governor Sarah Palin opposed the so-called bridge to nowhere in Alaska. Says Ms. Huffington, ‘online there was an absolutely obsessive campaign to prove that wrong’, which they quickly did, causing the McCain campaign to backtrack, making them look foolish. ‘In 2004, trust me, they would have gone on repeating it, because the echo chamber [of the mainstream media] would not have been as facile’, says Ms. Huffington.

HuffingtonPost’s ‘Off the Bus’ team of 10,000 citizen journalists caught candidates saying things that embarrassed them later, even Obama when he made his ‘guns and religion’ remark at a private fundraiser. When Obama disappointed his supporters with a Senate vote in July 2008 on a wiretapping and surveillance law, many supporters led a revolt on MyBarackObama.com, prompting the candidate to write a long blog post explaining his position. Obama also assigned staffers to monitor and respond to comments posted on the campaign’s website. After a sort of cyber-catharsis of complaints, the controversy died down.

With the internet, critics and citizen journalists are everywhere. Now, says Ms. Huffington, ‘there is no off-the-record fund-raiser’. Adds Mr. Trippi, ‘this medium demands authenticity, and television for the most part demanded fake. Authenticity is something politicians have not been used to.’

Internet Fundraising and Small Money Donors

Team Obama’s use of the internet also allowed him to become a fundraising juggernaut. He raised more money than any US presidential candidate in history, a mind-numbing $750 million. In a single day following vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s speech at the Republican convention, an alarmed Democratic base donated an eye-popping $10 million to the Obama campaign. Just from mid-October to election day on November 4, he raised $104 million. Online donations totaled $500 million, twelve times as much as John Kerry raised through online fundraising in 2004. But unlike previous big fundraising candidates, most of his money came from small donors, the vast bulk of that in increments of $100 or less. Obama’s fundraising capabilities gave him a massive lead over John McCain in the money race to carry his campaign message to voters.

The use of the internet in political campaigns has grown exponentially in a short period of time. The Obama campaign was not the first to use the internet, and many of the techniques and tools it deployed, such as Web 2.0, are still relatively new. Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign was groundbreaking in its use of the internet to raise small amounts of money from hundreds of thousands of people, and Mr. Dean was the first Democratic presidential candidate to use the internet to mobilize his supporters through his Blog for America. Republican strategists and operatives also have not ignored the internet. Michael Turk, the Bush-Cheney e-campaign director in 2004, says that the Republicans were able to mobilize their supporters through a combination of email lists and internet ‘data mining’. They identified potential Republican supporters in every precinct around the country, using technology which predicts voter preferences on the basis of commercial data on car ownership, magazine subscriptions, and the like. And then they sent their campaign volunteers detailed instructions on who to visit, including local maps of the area and walking routes, and issues that each potential voter was likely to be most concerned about.

The Obama campaign clearly learned from these previous efforts, and then took them to a newer, more sophisticated level. A short four years later in 2008, the internet tools already had morphed, as have the strategies they allow. As the internet tools continue to develop, so will the campaigns. Deploying all the many tactics used in his insurgent campaign, Barack Obama won the Democratic Party caucus in Iowa on January 3, and then beat Hillary Clinton in 13 of 22 states on Super Tuesday, February 5, 2008. Over the next month, with his legions of mobilized supporters, he racked up win after win in Democratic primary states, putting together a lead that was insurmountable when Clinton finally won a few important primaries, especially in Ohio, later in the primary season.

On August 23, Obama announced the selection of his running mate Joe Biden via text message, then he took that momentum and rolled it into the presidential election against Republican nominee John McCain. By election day, more than 1 million people were signed up for the campaigns text messaging program, each receiving 5 to 20 targeted messages per month. The final days before November 4 saw the Obama campaign sending daily emails and texts exhorting supporters to vote with friends, participate in phone drives, and volunteer at campaign events near the supporter’s home. They even offered a contest in which last-minute donors could be selected to attend Obama’s election-night party. And on election day itself, every battleground state voter signed up for Obama alerts received at least three text messages.

With its internet-based campaign strategy, Team Obama transformed his early fledgling campaign into a steamroller that rolled up one of the most impressive presidential victories in decades. Barack Obama’s campaign was successful at converting online geek activism into real-world organizing, including political rallies, videos on YouTube, and most important, donations and votes. By using interactive Web 2.0 tools, Mr. Obama’s campaign changed the way politicians can mobilize supporters, raise money, advertise to voters, defend against attacks and communicate with constituents.

President Obama: The First Internet President?

Since winning the election, Team Obama has continued to utilize the many internet tools and resources that helped get him elected. The Obama administration is applying them to the earliest stages of governing and shaping policy, as well as to maintaining its connections to its supporters.

Even before taking office, the newly-elected Obama administration began drawing on internet tools to lay the groundwork for an attempt to restructure the US health care system. They launched a new website, Change.gov, and in December 2008 Obama’s point person on health care launched an effort to create political momentum in a conference call with 1,000 invited supporters culled from 10,000 who had expressed interest in health issues. First they posted a simple 63-second video on Change.gov, posing the question, ‘what worries you most about the health care system in our country?’ That triggered 3,700 responses, including personal tales of medical hardship. The subsequent cyber-conversation was interactive, allowing individuals to reply to one another and rate responses with thumbs up or down. The Obama technology gurus then built a ‘word cloud’ showing the 100 most frequently used words in the responses.

That was the first attempt by the Obama team to harness its vast and sophisticated grassroots network to shape public policy. Some see this as a potentially new force in American politics. ‘When Congress refuses to go with his agenda, it’s not going to be just the President’ they oppose, says Mr. Trippi. It will be the President and his huge virtual network of citizens.

‘Just like Kennedy brought in the television presidency, I think we are about to see the first wired, connected, networked presidency’, says Mr. Trippi.

Reed Hundt, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and Obama technology advisor, says that the forthcoming administration will have a commitment ‘to have our entire democracy include everyone and through these tools [like Twitter and text messaging] be able to share information in a rapid way and have ideas shared from below.’

‘This is the beginning of the reinvention of what the presidency in the 21st century could be’, said Simon Rosenberg, president of the Washington DC based think tank NDN. ‘This will reinvent the relationship of the President to the American people in a way we probably have not seen since FDR’s use of radio in the 1930s.’

While Barack Obama has generated much excitement about the future of a wired democracy, some are wondering whether his success can be replicated, or if this was a once in a generation phenomena. The success of the Obama campaign was driven in part by the collision of two unique phenomena: first, the charisma of the candidate himself with a message that appealed especially to young people, and second, a technology that young people have mastered more than anyone else. The millennials are more wired into the new media and online social networks than any other demographic, and Obama tapped into that youthful sense of hope and optimism.

‘Barack Obama is three things you want in a brand’, says Keith Reinhard of DDB Worldwide, a global advertising agency. ‘New, different, and attractive. That is as good as it gets.’

Or perhaps the Obama story is partly about the success of a new form of ‘leadership’. Obama, through his inclusive website and his lofty rhetoric, reinforced the notion that everyone is included and that his movement is actually a conversation to which everyone is invited.

Some are saying that Obama epitomizes a new way of thinking called ‘adaptive leadership’ – while a boss puts forward a specific plan to be implemented and everyone is expected to follow, an adaptive leader works with constituents to devise a plan together. He gets people to do things on their own, through inspiration, respect, and trust. Obama has tapped into this vein by inviting voters in with his ‘Yes We Can’ slogan. ‘Change will not come if we wait for some other person’, he said on Super Tuesday, ‘or if we wait for some other time… We are the hope of the future.’

Beyond all the hype about the messenger, the message or their methods, what is clear is that the ongoing development of internet tools is having a tremendous impact on political campaigns. In a sense, the internet has become a ‘steroid’ of politics – a candidate does not dare not use it, and use it well, because if your opponent is able to marshal its potential, you will be up against a mobilized, well-financed army. No doubt candidates in future elections will be using internet tools that have not yet even been developed. And when the right candidate with the right message comes along, tapping into those internet tools will allow that campaign to become a powerful political force.