Posts Tagged: obama

Thoughts — 2 Comments
5
Nov 08

Regarding the Facebook Effect

Over the coming weeks and months, the role of the internet and social media in the 2008 will be debated.  Wired News leads with the headline “Propelled by Internet, Barack Obama Wins Presidency.” Similar sentiment resounds in a New York Times piece entitled “The ’08 Campaign: Sea Change for Politics as We Know It.”  Joe Trippi, comparing Obama’s ‘08 effort to Howard Dean’s, states “they were Apollo 11, and we were the Wright Brothers.”  In my writing I’ve tried to tamper expectations regarding the political effect of social media.  That said, I do think social media helped win this election, though not in the way one might expect.

Before we proceed I want to unpack (and delineate) the effects of the internet and social media.  To keep this post topical, I’m not going to debate the effect of the internet.  The internet proved to be a financial and informational juggernaut, powering both the Obama and McCain campaigns.  Obama was prescient to opt out of campaign financing, as the internet provided him a supply of funding that was simply unprecedented.  That was a huge factor in his victory, a point beyond debate.

The effect of social media is more nuanced.  Howard Fineman of Newsweek wrote of the Facebook effect, something that I’ve heard a lot about over the course of this election.  The Facebook (or YouTube, or MySpace, or … ) effects attempt to connect social media use with political participation.  Early in the campaigns, we talked about how candidates could use these tools to engage their supporters, how these tools had a potential transformative effect.  Comparing statistics on the number of candidate Facebook friends was a fun pastime, but one always wondered what the effect of this virtual support might be.

I’d like to present an alternative statistic for analyzing the role of social media in the campaign.  It comes from a 2008 Pew Internet and American Life Study entitled “Home Broadband Adoption 2008.”  The report finds that 55% of American homes have broadband internet, and that approximately three-quarters of Americans are internet users.

Home Broadband

Pew is careful to point out systematic underrepresentation of some populations (low income, elderly) in broadband adoption.  I read this as a broad swath of Americans having access to the full potential of the internet.  One reading of “full potential” is that more Americans have access to streaming video and all of the other nifty things the broadband internet can do.  Certainly, that is important.  What I think is much more important is the “everyday life” impacts of broadband access on the deliberative political process.

Social Networks like Facebook reveal our lives to one another in novel and interesting ways.  I’m able to friend you and watch your life pass by in a News Feed.  Because of the pragmatics of daily life I probably wouldn’t be able to keep up with that information otherwise.  A side effect of this is that I’m also influenced by you – your decisions about the information you share or the identity you create.  And in this very personal, important election, many of us chose to wear our beliefs on our sleeves.

This phenomenon didn’t just occur in online social networks.  Every time a relative forwarded an email, every time an IM friend passed around a YouTube link, every blog post you “stumbled” upon because of someone else’s social action – these constitute important influence processes.  And because the internet is now this vast place where most of us can reliably find those we care about, where we can connect with them in a variety of formats, the influence of our everyday acts now carry more weight.  The media we consume online, the information we push around is social – because social is the ends to the widely-adopted internet’s means.

This is not to detract from Facebook or Myspace or any of the countless participation efforts that were launched this year.  I’m sure these efforts paid dividends in many ways.  But Obama was not elected because of a “Facebook Effect.”  No, what happened is that the internet helped us pull the veil back on one another.  It provided us a panoply of channels to discuss and share our beliefs, sometimes with intent, and sometimes by complete accident.  It provided the third space for political discourse that the futurists talked about.  It is not surprising there was a moderating effect.  As we connect and learn more about one another, we’re finding ways to share our beliefs and find common ground.  It is in everyday activity, where the sharing of media becomes social and influential, we see the true political power of the internet.  While I’m convinced that plenty of people changed their votes because of knocks on the front door, I’m also convinced plenty of us observed our friends, were engaged by their support, and decided that pulling the lever for Obama couldn’t be all that bad.

Noticed — No Comments
23
Jun 08

Doug Rushkoff on Obama’s Brand

In the post Obama and the Internet, I discussed the power of Obama’s brand. Via techPresident, an essay by academic and critic Douglas Rushkoff exploring participatory politics and Obama’s powerful brand.

Brands were invented primarily to replace local commerce and social activity with mass produced goods and corporate-provided services. Brand mythologies alienate people from one another and insert themselves in the place of real relationships. Instead of buying meat, corn, drugs, or soap from local producers, we buy them from A&P, Green Giant, Wal-Mart or P&G. These national brands have great mythologies, but serve to disconnect us from one another, and distribute power to those with capital and away from people who actually do work.

The danger in Brand Obama is that our focus on a heroic or mythic presidency could easily distract us from the hard work and reality of creating change ourselves. “Hard working” democrats loved listening to Hilary Clinton talk about how hard she was going to work for them because it made it seem like the president is in position to stay up all night and, through the extra effort, get food on our tables or money in our bank accounts. It just doesn’t work that way, and Obama’s refusal to, say, cut gas taxes over the summer to cater to this mentality speaks volumes.

Read the full essay.

Noticed — No Comments
19
Jun 08

Linking Unit Structures

Commenting on a few items that have caught my attention:

The last few emails I’ve received from Barack Obama have been accompanied by a short video. In the videos, Obama appears in front of a dark backdrop, with a tight camera shot – just like Ze, without all the cuts. These videos evoke a personal conversation – Obama often introduces himself simply as “Barack,” the dark background offers no distractions or location information, and they’re usually kept to a minute or two. They’re very reminiscent of a hallway conversation – as if you just bumped into Barack and he wanted to catch up.

These strike me as fireside chats for the digital era; Obama’s team seems to understand this by only deploying them in “big news” situations. What is most interesting is the personal connections these videos can forge. While Obama is clearly broadcasting, the video retains a personal feel, as if the potential president dropped by for a chat. I wonder how such an approach would transfer to the oval office. Now that the YouTube “Gotcha” clip is passe in digital politics, I’ll be very interested to watch how this particular video strategy evolves.

In other news, The awesome adaptation of privacy-encroaching technology award goes to “teenagers” who are now using Google Maps to find backyard swimming pools, and Facebook to organize illicit dips in said pools.

ABC News runs a piece entitled Will GPS Make Us Dumb? Terrible title, but just like we’ve forgotten phone numbers and CD track titles, what elements of the spatial experience will go away when we’ve got persistent positional data? With modern transit we’ve moved to a place-to-place mentality – is GPS the death knell for the pass-through areas? On the other hand, one might argue that positional data stands to create new interest in the areas we used to just pass through – you might have never known great tacos were just two minutes off that random exit on the freeway.

Thoughts — 2 Comments
16
Jun 08

Obama and the Internet

This morning, Pew released summary findings from their ongoing study of the Internet and the 2008 election. Alan Rosenblatt’s written them up for techPresident. In the context of Obama’s recent victory in the 2008 primary, I thought I might revisit some of my previous thinking on Obama and the internet.

There seems to be consensus that Obama is the internet’s candidate. Pew’s findings confirm this, as do countless anecdotes about Obama’s internet prowess. When thinking about technology and campaigns, we have to think about directionality. The common assumption is that technology generates awareness; i.e. campaigns should create technologies to market a candidate. This internet-centric view affirms the value of the internet as a game-changer, in which a candidate can win because of the internet.

The opposing view casts the internet as a harness; rather than generating interest online, interest is generated in many spaces, and internet technologies exist to harness the interest. Instead of looking as a technology as an end, technology becomes one of thousands of means through which interest, communication and money is funneled. I’ll argue that this model, as opposed to the game-changing model, is the model of Obama 2008 and successful future candidacies.

Candidates are brands. This was never more clear to me than the years between 2000 and 2006, where “W” and Bush/Cheney bumper stickers proliferated. Affixing that bumper sticker was a signal of class, status and ideological affiliation – that one could “afford” to support Bush, and all that Bush’s brand embodies. With all due respect to the other candidates, Obama has emerged as the brand of 2008. His message, youth and pan-cultural appeal have created a perfect storm, and now he’s bigger than Apple, Google, Nike and Vitamin Water all put together.

So lets get back to technology and directionality. In January I wrote a piece for TP called Social Networks and Youth Voter Activation. Rejecting the game-changer model, I argued that social networks act as harnesses for activated interest. If you’ve got a population that is activated by a brand, they’ll turn to the information tools at hand to further that interest – through information seeking, friend-finding, volunteering, donating, etc. Therefore, the first part of Obama’s success wasn’t the tools he developed, but rather the tools that were at hand, that we all knew how to use – Facebook, YouTube, etc.

Tools are only part of the equation – they only provide a venue for communication. In The Social Filter, we see how communicative norms have changed around the technology, to allow all of us to become “personal marketers” to one another. Yes, I hate the idea of personal marketing, but the fact is when you send a YouTube link, invite someone to a Facebook group, broadcast a Twitter of support – you’re marketing to your networks. This is very low level, contextually-appropriate marketing (and if you’re like the 95% of the homophile us, your friends share your interests), but it is marketing nonetheless. Such marketing builds a cycle of activation, one that drives interest back into toolsets, marketing to personal networks, and so on.

This is not to say that Obama hasn’t developed cool tools. I’m sure he has. But I’ve used his creaky social network, and I can guarantee you that Obama’s success online has nothing to do with the tools he’s developed, and everything to do with the tools we already use. These tools of social interaction provide spaces for communication, spaces into which we share our messages, contest our beliefs, and negotiate our candidate of choice. That Obama’s demographic is very clearly the users of these tools, that he has creative types working for him, that he isn’t fighting peer-production only makes this cycle more successful.

Obama’s is the model of successful internet campaigning. Supporters must be activated, they must use the tools they know and understand, and the campaign has to take its hands off. This formula has created a cycle of activation, one that will continue to grow through the general election and thereafter.

Thoughts — No Comments
7
Jan 08

Social networks and youth voter activation

Cross posted to techPresident.com.

Since the 2008 races began, we’ve collectively watched the social technology space for emergent technologies that connect or motivate potential voters. I’ve looked for silver-bullet tools – a great Facebook app that brings the candidate to the voter, or a new type of social network tool that gets out the vote, raises funds efficiently, etc. Largely, I’ve been disappointed; the candidates haven’t developed too many cool or innovative tools, and the neat third-party ideas haven’t gained all that much traction (with a few notable exceptions). Even last week I was telling friends and reporters that this was the YouTube election, which unfairly writes off the whole social network space.

After watching the Iowa returns and reading blog and press accounts, I’m starting to see a potential third way for social network technology. Caveat, I don’t have ethnography to back this up, this is just my opinion, but I think there’s something here. So the old model of social network sites and campaigns proposes that some uber-tool, say a great Facebook app, leverages all sorts of information and eventually gets out the vote or raises funds. That is, the end goals of the electoral process can be attacked programatically, that all problems are solvable with enough data. A nice idea, but not true. Facebook’s Beacon and Social Ads are insightful here; even with unlimited data and great programming, machines attempting to “socially” influence fall short; the algorithms and points of interaction just aren’t human enough. I don’t want to join Blockbuster just because I’m served ads with the face of some guy I’ve met a few times, and I probably won’t switch my vote just because a candidate is spamming my newsfeed.

Lets step back for a second and think about where social networks excel: Birthday reminders. When I log into Facebook, I can see whose birthday it is today, and within a few seconds go post a “happy birthday” reminder on my friend’s wall. I’m happy, my friend is happy, and the whole transaction has cost me no more than thirty seconds. What can politicians learn from social network birthday messages?

Social networks encourage interaction, and the birthday wall posting is an example. There are two important factors in this transaction: the ease with which you can see your social network (the friend list) and ease and multiple methods which you can contact that friend through the network. By multiple methods, I mean wall posts, private messages, poking, superwall, etc. Unlike email, which is single mode and carries all sorts of social context, multiple methods of contact enable one to choose an appropriate space for messaging, one that fits the context. As political messages are sometimes controversial, having multiple message spaces enables the individual to consider the best space in which to pass the message, and act accordingly. That is, humans can effectively tailor their message to the space.

So what does all this mean? Social networks provide excuses for interaction. An articulable friend list makes it easy for one to envision and contact their network. And multi-modal messaging makes it more appropriate to pass political messages; if you’re not comfortable directly soliciting new friends to come to a fundraiser via direct, personal message, you could post a casual invite on their wall. Because there are multiple contexts and expectations, the humans can suss out the best venue for their messages and act accordingly. This effectively means more messages, passed by humans, in more appropriate, less spammy contexts. This means humans influencing humans, virtual shoes hitting the pavement.

One large question remains: how does this cycle of connection get started. In the technocentric vision, there’s some great algorithm in the sky that motivates us. In the scenario I’m posing, activation comes from far more traditional means: advertising, media coverage, empathy to candidate, etc. A potential connector is reached via the media and decides its time to start working for his or her candidate. The connector turns to online information sources, subscribes to mailing lists, Googles the candidate, and starts passing messages to like-minded friends in the social network context.

The obvious downside of this approach is that it reifies existing models, it blasts the technocentric approach, and it treats social networks as a message channel, not some revolutionary new social space. That is, its somewhat reality based. Simply because a generation uses social technology it does not mean that the entire playbook has to be thrown away. Young people see ads on TV, they page through the newspaper left open in the kitchen, and they pick candidates for reasons similar to anyone else. What is different about the social network users is that once activated and motivated, they can very effectively leverage these high-availability, low-spam, popular message networks to influence friends and contacts. In fact, the throwaway, simple nature of messaging in social networks is its virtue; a 2500-word email with graphics doesn’t work, but a young person may decide to click through a wall post or private message from a friends. And of course, once a cohort of supporters are identified, it becomes trivial to be always connected and activated in an SNS.

Web 2.0 technologies have long forced candidates to step back and take their hands off, there’s only so much they can control. Social networks are just another example; supporters will use the networks for purposes they devise. The record youth turnout in Iowa wasn’t caused by social networks, but one can imagine that wall postings, reminders, events, and personal messages kept young people activated, motivated and interested. It wasn’t a huge group, a Facebook app, or some algorithm that provided motivation, but rather interpersonal contact in appropriate venues. To this extent, social networks are part of a communication ecology, albeit a very important one for a very important demographic. Candidates should consider how best to leverage this reality, as it provides both a challenge and tremendous opportunity.

Noticed / Thoughts — 3 Comments
11
Feb 07

Social Networks and Political Campaigns: A Web 2.0 Manifesto

I’ve been following the launch and reaction to Barack Obama’s social network offering, my.barackobama.com. While the intersection of politics and social networks are anything but new (they were utilized effectively by a number of Democratic candidates in the 2006 cycle), the private-label social network offering by a presidential candidate is new. I’ve enjoyed a couple of reactions to Obama’s social network, particularly Fred Wilson’s and Tony Hung’s. I’ll be the first to admit that this is somewhat uncharted territory, so I’ll approach my analysis somewhat gently. To that extent, though, I think there’s a significant amount of best practice that we’ve learned from other social networks that will be directly relevant to Obama’s offering (as well as the other candidates that will inevitably launch social networks).

By launching a private-label social network, Obama’s campaign achieves two goals. First, it gets people talking, particularly the neterati who care about these things. It establishes Obama as a net-savvy candidate, in an election cycle that will increasingly play to the mores of the social web. Second, it sets a precedent. I believe that the other mainline candidates will follow Obama’s lead, and there are likely a whole host of vendors salivating at the chance to represent a political candidate with their private-label SNS.

At the outset, Obama’s site is inoffensive. There’s not a whole lot you can do, interactivity is somewhat limited, and the site lacks the dynamic feel that I’ve come to expect from social networks. However, this isn’t a terrible strategy. I believe that putting simple, core features in the hands of users and iterating on top of those features is a fair plan (if that is the plan). The fact Obama’s site has a 4 second reload on everything you do is completely bizarre, however, and should be fixed quickly. It is a little too DIY-feeling for a presidential candidate.

With all social networks or communities, the ultimate question to be answered is “What goal is the technology helping achieve?” In the case of Obama’s network, it really isn’t clear what purpose the network serves. Sure, I can log in and find other people, or blog, look up an event, but isn’t that much easier on a site like Facebook, where the Obama group “Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack) already has 250,000 members? Ironically, Obama himself doesn’t even belong to this group (Note to the Obama web people, wake up and embrace the social media). By attempting to create a social network to solve a need that other social networks have solved, is Obama just reinventing the wheel?

In the 2008 election cycles, different networks will serve different purposes. Facebook, Myspace and the other premier social networks will undoubtedly serve as connection vectors for followers of political candidates. Why? Network effect. There are always going to be more people on Myspace or Facebook than on Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton, or Sam Brownback’s social network. As such, it is absolutely important for campaigns to realize that they’ll always be competing with (and losing to) these social networks. So what good does a private label network provide?

The answer lies in answering situationally relevant information needs of individuals in a simple, low-involvement fashion. The candidate’s social network should serve as the nexus of information about the candidate. It should be the place that I can go to to find anything and everything about the candidate, information about events, snippets and facts I can blog about, heavy integration of social media such as Flickr or Youtube so I can experience everything about the candidate in a single place. It should not try to act as the sole vector between the candidate’s supporters. In fact, doing so could be significantly harmful, as it might give supporters the impression that this private-label group is the only netgroup that supports the candidate, obviously leaving aside the millions that support the candidate in other groups.

My vision of the purpose these networks would serve is actually quite simple. The information need is clear: people need to know stuff about the candidate they support. The candidate they support is a lifestyle brand. The social network is the perfect place to embrace this lifestyle brand, in the sense that it connects information sharers. What if I logged into Obama’s social network and what I saw where 15 great Flickr pictures, all creative-commons licensed, that I could easily upload to my blog. What if I logged in an I could find a set of widgets that I could post on Myspace, Bebo or that would update my network with information about Obama, or even things like his travel schedule (“See Obama Here!”) or fundraising goals (“Help me raise the last 10% for Obama”). What if I logged into Obama’s network and I saw a list of Obama groups in other networks (“Join the 250,000 supporters on Facebook!”). In the words of community marketer extraordinare Tara Hunt – what if Obama “embraced the chaos.”

In reality, 2008 is going to be about the enmeshing of networks. Some of the action that goes on in the networks will be centrally maintained, but some (as in the example of the Facebook group) will be produced by people external to the campaign. Should candidates put their head in the sand and act like the external work doesn’t exist? Absolutely not. The simple reality is that by embracing social media, communities are going to play a significant role in the creation of the candidate. Like it or not, some of Obama’s online identity is going to be created by the Facebook group, over which he has no control. The millions of users who embrace Obama in one way or another will get their messages from a number of different sources, so central control is effectively impossible.

This is not to say that centrally-managed efforts like Obama’s social network are useless. Indeed, they’re anything but. I believe that, properly managed, such communities could play an absolutely integral part of the 2008 cycles. However, to understand how to use these tools, candidates must look at how community marketing has changed in the advent of Web 2.0. Companies like Youtube and Myspace succeeded because they embraced openness (Youtube was largely unknown until it let people embed their videos in Myspace, for example). The candidate who embraces this mentality will make the most sense to the netvoter, as our sensibilities have changed significantly over the past few years.

To boil this concept down to its essence, candidates must remember that while they play an important part in their strategy, they are not the sole drivers. In the coming cycle, external individuals who get social media will harness lots of eyeballs on behalf of the candidate. This is going to happen – it is already happening. Candidates must embrace this and ally with these efforts, and they truly represent the expanse of the support provided to the candidate.

Candidates must also realize the role their technology plays, and the disadvantage they have when competing in the marketplace. As hard as they may try, a private-label social network is never going to compete with a site like Facebook. So don’t even try. However, the private-label social network can be the nexus for important, useful information. Instead of trying to own a significant amount of the voter’s online time, try and own 5 very useful minutes in which you provide them with good links to external resources, rich media. Make it a hub. Make it a something of a placeful RSS aggregator that is edited by someone on the campaign that truly gets social media. Hire someone that truly gets social media.

Individuals are going to come to candidates with a significant information need. They are going to look for community, and connections, and answers. In 2008, the network that represents a candidate is going to be spread across many services, it will be controlled by many players, and the marketplace of ideas will lift some of the best efforts to the top. The Web 2.0 candidate will harness the community’s work, and create a place that solves the information need of the people interested in the candidate. Make no mistake, the candidate of 2008 is competing in the marketplace, so he or she must figure out what they can do, and do well, and concentrate on that. Obama’s site, and the others that will come, have a good bit of work to do before they’re truly useful to their audience. Lets hope they get the message that the web has changed significantly since 2004, and they adjust their strategies accordingly.