Another in-depth look at the 2008 election, this time with a specific emphasis on Barack Obama’s social networking campaign online. This research project reflects the historical perspective I included in my previous project, but here, specifically emphasizes on what made Obama’s social network camapaigning so effective. Hopefully we can take these lessons and make the most of them in our future attempts to regain political ground as a party.
In the aftermath of the 2008 election, a few things were immediately clear: Barack Obama was to be the next president of the United States, and we as a nation had just entered a new era of political communication- the online age. Obama has been praised far and wide for his online campaign, which raised over half a billion dollars through the Internet alone (, November 2008). Yet, beyond being an extremely effective fundraising tool, it was difficult to measure the impacts of Obama’s Internet campaign and its outreach on social networking websites. To examine this, the question arises- what social networking campaigns were employed by Barack Obama’s campaign, and how can they be most effectively measured to determine their impact? To answer this question, we must look at the campaign’s user targeting, branding and message use, and overall penetration in terms of supporter metrics. This allows a complete perspective of the campaign’s intention and planning, adaptation to the nuances of the candidate, and a measure of effectiveness from immediately available numbers.
INTRODUCTION
When viewing social media it is crucial to first understand the importance of the online market for campaigns. The Internet has become an increasingly important resource in recent years, particularly in the 2008 election. Approximately 74 percent of Internet users went online for information about the 2008 election, representing 55 percent of the entire adult population. These percentages mark the first time more than half of voting-age users went online for election information. When identifying “online political users” in a Pew Research poll, researchers found that 60 percent of Internet users received political news from the Internet, 59 percent used specific tools such as email, Twitter, texting or instant messaging to send or receive political messages, and 38 percent directly interacted with other online users about the election and political issues (). In 2008, 88 percent of voters looking to the Internet for information utilized traditional news sources, 42 percent went to “social media” sites, such as Facebook, YouTube and MySpace. the actual campaign websites for the candidates garnered only a paltry 30 percent (). Thus, the Internet provided an excellent starting point for getting interested voters involved in the campaign.
Obama and the internet seemed to be a perfect fit as well, which may explain the degree of innovation we have seen in this campaign. One of the advantages Obama clearly enjoyed was a campaign message which inherently motivated people to interact and was also widely popular at the time of the election- these facts must be considered in the evaluation of the campaign’s effectiveness. Obama was also able to motivate the younger voters in the 18-29 year old group, first due to his positions on the Iraq war and second his own personal background, which motivated the younger voters to energize and organize for his campaign from its onset (). This worked well to Obama’s advantage, because the younger age group also was able to drive support early on, due to their comparatively stronger presence online (Pew Research). This created a solid background of Internet support with little overhead and significant advance direction, factors that served to advance Obama aggressively in the general election.
In fact, Obama had a very personal interest in the online campaign itself, which made a significant difference in how the online section was handled. The designer of the campaign’s social network my.barackobama.com, Chris Hughes, is actually a co-founder of Facebook. He left a lucrative position at Facebook to work on the campaign because of Obama’s active stance. “As great as Barack is, if the campaign hadn’t been constituted in this idea of investing in our everyday supporters and helping them organize among themselves, I wouldn’t have been as excited about the job,” he said (, August 2008). However, what the campaign did with the message outside of these inherent attentions laid the groundwork for a very successful “viral” campaign through use of targeting, branding, message discipline and social media penetration.
TARGETING
Social media targeting was very effectively managed by the Barack Obama campaign during the 2008 campaign. Expansive outreach to different sites also assisted Obama’s team- according to campaign worker Scott Goodstein, “Some people only go to MySpace. It’s where they’re on all day. Some only go to LinkedIn. Our goal is to make sure that each supporter online, regardless of where they are, has a connection with Obama. Then, as much as we can, we try to drive everyone to our site” (Washington Post, August 2008). Obama’s reach would ultimately extend to over 15 different social networking sites, including less-trafficked social networking sites such as BlackPlanet for African Americans and Eons for Baby Boomers. These allowed him to go directly to people where they were, and direct them toward the campaign website (Washington Post, November 2008). This approach means that the BarackObama.com website was the ultimate destination for every ad and social networking campaign, allowing the campaign to have one main area of focus for getting people directly involved- the website.
Once a user arrived at a campaign website, the targeting became even narrower to get the user involved with the campaign. Specifically, through the use of tracking cookies from the Obama websites, the campaign was allowed to see how users travelled around the Internet and which ads were more enticing to users and which were not. This allowed the campaign to segment its ads, focusing the ads towards older or younger voters based on what would be most effective. This kind of data collection permitted the campaign to see exactly who was on their side, who they could persuade, and who they could get more involved.
According to Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, the approach simplified the process of gaining volunteers and targeting potential contributors- ‘you can see where you get traction, and then reinvest, based on data’ (Hill). There was also attention to having multiple options available on the my.barackobama.com website, which was the social network for the campaign website. There, users had options for blogging, planning events, fundraising, joining groups and volunteering. The user-type groups on the site range from environmentalists to veterans to women-specific, allowing supporters to interact and engage on areas they agree on, and select their focus to recruit more people who already share their policy interests (Washington Post, August 20).
When tracking Internet usage, one significant detail emerges which seems entirely counter-intuitive. McCain could have had the edge on Obama in terms of online support- McCain’s supporters outnumbered Obama’s supporters in online users by 83 percent to 76 percent. However despite this numerical advantage, built somewhat from the fact that Republicans generally have more income and education than Democrats, Obama supporters significantly outperformed their Republican counterparts in terms of interactivity. Obama supporters shared their message with friends at a rate of 22 percent compared to McCain supporters sharing at 14 percent (Pew Research). This online interactivity meant that at every point, Obama’s messages had a higher chance of being read and sent to a friend rather than being merely discarded. It also meant that the messages were more likely to come from people the recipient would know, and thus make the message more easily received.
Thus the question- how did the Obama campaign motivate people to invest to the point of sharing with others?
BRANDING AND MESSAGE DISCIPLINE
Two factors which seem to be integral to most campaigns, but which are rarely put together in the same precise context, are branding and message discipline. One thing the Obama campaign was able to handle productively was the association of the two- without one or the other, the entire package would have fallen apart. If message discipline is sacrificed, it undercuts the power of the symbol of the campaign. And if the symbol of the campaign does not motivate, the discipline of the message is irrelevant. However, the two seem to be intertwined in the Obama campaign in a way that serves as an example for future online campaigns- a successful campaign cannot happen without synthesizing both .
Branding through the Obama logo, the now-ubiquitous O, followed a very interesting history- the logo design specialist who developed the symbol for the campaign had never worked with political logos before, but he immediately recognized some key elements about the design that would be necessary for the campaign to become as enigmatic as it did. He brought the themes of unity together in the color patterns, looking at the way the colors interacted specifically. From there, there was an emphasis on developing a logo that “had an element that stood separate from the typography”- this would allow for the symbolism of the logo to become as adaptable as it later was. According to the logo designer, Sol Sender, once the logo was launched, “it was really everywhere, very quickly”. From there, designers working with the Obama campaign adapted the logo for a variety of different demographics- for kids, women, Latinos, religious voters and others. The campaign extended the logo to their different social media networks, and it became viral from there, spawning everything from “Yes We Carve” Jack-O-Lanterns to “Pirates for Obama” t-shirts, with the logo turned upside down. According to the designer, “it helped to get his message out there as powerfully as it did” ().
Message discipline worked well with the Obama campaign because, as mentioned before, the messages were already suited for an online interactive audience. However, Obama’s overall media strategy allowed the adaptability to be more than just a logo- the message was unified throughout the different networks, but emphasized different points of the overall message on each different specialized group. As reported by the New York Times- “Obama’s New Way organization was grounded largely on Old School codes — notions of loyalty, aggressiveness and discretion.” There was an early tight-knit leadership team Obama had worked with who kept their campaign decisions close to the vest. This ensured that, while the campaign maintained an open front on the websites, their own voice was unified from the campaign ().
This was demonstrated in the way the campaign handled a negative reaction on the website for when Obama compromised on FISA, which granted immunity to telecom industries- a group called “President Obama, Please Get FISA Right” was formed on my.barackobama.com which rapidly became the largest group on the website (Washington Post, August 2008). Ultimately, Obama wrote out a long explanation of his vote on his website, maintaining discipline without compromising. Staffers were assigned to deal with the comments on this section and reply personally to upset supporters. As one observer reported, “[after] a sort of cyber-catharsis of complaints, the controversy died down” (Hill). This example shows how the campaign was able to use the Internet to both reach out to potential supporters as well as take steps to prevent current supporters from using his online presence against him in a negative way.
By way of comparison, there is some evidence that McCain’s campaign was less potent online partly because of its failure to coordinate messages across mediums. The biggest example of this was the McCain Victory 2008 “blogroll”, which was a list of blogs supporting for McCain for President which linked to each other. Essentially, these worked as an “echo chamber”- a top-down system of disseminating talking points about Obama. These sites had no collaboration with the McCain social networking site, which would ultimately mean that there would be less message coordination and create actual message confusion. Ultimately some online sources ended up running messages contrary to the campaign’s message which were interpreted as having come from McCain’s campaign. This eventually led to an overall sense of dissatisfaction with the campaign, as well as confusion. The level of confusion was epitomized when Megan McCain accidentally identified Brad Marston, co-founder of the McCain Victory 2008 blogroll, as the “McCain e-campaign coordinator” on her blog ().
This lack of message discipline proves how crucial these factors can be in an online campaign where resources can be confused so easily. Combine this report with the fact that McCain never created an identifying symbol as powerful as Obama did, and it becomes more apparent that both branding and message discipline work together. Were the McCain campaign sites distinguished through effective branding, there would be less confusion about whether the other Blogrolls were associated with the campaign or not. And as McCain’s campaign lacked the strong unifying symbols Obama had to bring the message of the campaign together and unify his supporters, there was little enough significant interest in the campaign to make as much of the lack of campaign discipline.
SOCIAL NETWORK PENETRATION
Obama’s emphasis on his Internet presence would net him 2.3 million unique visitors in May, right before the end of the Democratic primary- one measure reported that between Obama’s site and McCain’s site, Obama’s site had 72% of the total traffic (Washington Post, August 2008). On the social networking websites, Obama has over 5 million supporters in all his different social networks. The most popular social networks such as Facebook and MySpace are covered, usually with specific groups representing geographic areas or demographics, allowing more people to get involved and get updates specific to their interest or location (Washington Post, November 2008). This was critical as it went back to the original goal of going to the Internet user were they were and the campaign bringing them in however they could. Then actors such as momentum were allowed to come into play, as well as direct association invitations.
However, what is of more interest is the social network the campaign created and how it used these profiles to drive traffic to my.barackobama.com. Ultimately, 2 million profiles were created on Obama’s social networking site. On that site, 400,000 blog posts were written, 200,000 real-world events were planned and 35,000 volunteer groups were formed. The website also featured a virtual phone-bank, which supporters used to make over 3 million calls in the last four days of the campaign alone. Over $30 million dollars was raised just through the links on the profile pages of individual users (Washington Post, November 2008). These numbers represent more than just a mass of unverifiable users on the Internet- much has been made of the fact that users can maintain multiple profiles and therefore inflate the “crowds” of people online supporting any given cause. However, the proof that the networking strategy worked here is in the phone calls and real-world events that came of the online meetings. Looking at these numbers will give a better sense of the actual impact of the campaign rather than just looking at the number of supporters.
Another key area where Obama was able to drive a lot of traffic was the online video section, as well as his YouTube channel, which allowed his campaign to post thousands of videos without having to pay for overhead to TV stations and the like. According to Joe Trippi, campaign manager for Howard Dean, “The campaign’s official stuff they created for YouTube was watched for 14.5 million hours… to buy 14.5 million hours on broadcast TV is $47 million” (). By August, Obama’s team had shot over 2,000 hours of video, uploading over 1,110 videos online. This was able to get people excited and motivated on local levels because they were able to see other people who were excited about the campaign, and the message spread from there. According to the manager of Obama’s video team, “Here, we don’t worry about how many views our videos get. That’s not the priority. One of our goals is to get people talking about what’s going on in their lives and why they’re supporting Barack — and hopefully not only will they watch the videos but also comment on them and forward them to relatives and friends and co-workers” (Washington Post, August 2008). And yet the numbers for the views on these videos continued to grow, showing the continuing importance and power of incorporating video into the social networks- this allows people to interact with the material on a continual basis and to reinforce the messages and the themes of the campaign without having to expend continual effort.
The branding effect was also apparently powerful in real-world social networking. The iconic O from Obama’s logo was prominently displayed on all of the various social networking sites, and pretty soon users would take the logo and integrate it on their own websites and profiles. The symbol became so ubiquitous that it began to drive sales of real-life merchandise- Obama-themed merchandise would out-sell McCain merchandise by a ratio of 5 to 1. Many observers would attribute this to the symbolism used on the websites of Obama- it had become so ubiquitous online that it had created a demand for the real-world t-shirts and bumper stickers ().
CONCLUSION
When looking at Obama’s social networking strategy, there are three key areas crucial to understanding and assessing Obama’s social media campaign- targeting, branding and message discipline, and social network penetration. These factors worked together to create an overall cohesive social networking campaign which reached out to voters in different social networks based on their demographics, geography and interest. From there, the campaign brought them into their own social network where they could be more actively engaged and encourage others to be a part. Here, the branding and message discipline worked together to ensure that people had a clear idea of what the campaign was about, as well as creating a common banner and symbolism that people could identify with and identify the campaign with. From there, the social networks maintained themselves, creating increasing support and outreach as the campaign gained momentum. While certain inherent factors such as early demographics and message appeal pushed Obama’s campaign forward with more vigor, it seems that the personal interest of the candidate in the campaign also played a large part in ensuring the social media campaign got the adequate attention it needed to succeed. Throughout these factors, it becomes clear not just that a successful social networking campaign can happen again, but that it will happen again. After this level of involvement, no candidate will be able to run for any position without having some sort of online component.
Welcome to the online age of politics.
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