The secrets of Obama's success

By Ben Self

Two months, thousands of hours and millions of words later, the 2008 American presidential election has been broken down and analysed many times over. Lofty descriptions like "historic", "game-changing" and "paradigm-shifting" have been used to describe what started in early 2007 in a Chicago office building and eventually built a movement throughout the United States and around the world.
Of all that can be learned from Obama's victory - and its unprecedented $500 million raised from over three million supporters - perhaps the key lesson is that the internet has made traditional top-down strategy obsolete. Future political campaigns, non-profits, corporations, and other institutions, would be wise to take notice: in an increasingly wired world, giving real power to ordinary people has become critical to the success of any organisation.
The Obama campaign understood that grassroots volunteers are far more likely to participate when they feel that they are an integral part of an organisation - rather than a resource to be used temporarily and then discarded. They achieved this by using the internet to consistently inform, engage, and empower their supporters.
The campaign devoted countless hours to making sure that their supporters were armed with the latest information. BarackObama.com was updated constantly and filled with any information that a supporter could possibly want about Barack Obama. The campaign's official blog was updated more than a dozen times a day, and the campaign posted over 2,000 videos in its YouTube channel, from in-depth documentaries to concise educational issue videos.
Campaign manager David Plouffe recorded a series of YouTube videos that directly communicated campaign strategy and goals to supporters. These videos were more than trivial updates and regurgitations of what could be found in mainstream news sources - they gave supporters detailed and exclusive information about what the campaign was grappling with internally and why the support of the grassroots was so necessary. In one particularly candid video, Plouffe revealed that $39 million would be needed to win the state of Florida, and then he broke down, piece by piece, how these funds would be allocated if raised. This sort of information showed supporters that they had a seat at the table and gave them a sense that they were included in high-level conversations with the campaign's top brass.
But the Obama campaign did more than provide information - it created a genuine conversation with its vast online supporter base, which consisted of over 13 million email addresses, three million Facebook friends, two million MyBarackObama.com (the campaign's own social network) users, and millions of others, by the end of the campaign. The campaign devoted significant time towards monitoring the campaign's social networks, replying to messages, bulletin boards, and "wall" posts, so that its most active supporters were engaged in a true conversation with the staff. In many cases, the campaign deployed staffers and volunteers to pick up the phone and call active supporters to give them helpful suggestions and offer support for event-planning, personal fundraising drives, and other grassroots activities.
Once engaged, people become empowered to advocate on behalf of the campaign in their existing social networks. These new avenues of communication result in the dissemination of the campaign's message to an exponentially larger, previously untapped audience of potential activists. And perhaps most importantly, the campaign gave supporters tools to organise themselves offline as well. Tens of thousands of organic, grassroots-generated events took place across the country - from house meetings, to local park clean-ups, to neighbourhood canvassing efforts. Instead of standing in the way of these bottom-up activities, the campaign continually gave supporters the assistance they needed to organise themselves more effectively.
Leaving the top-down structure behind has become essential for the process of transforming a person who visits a webpage into an advocate who is willing to sacrifice time and money to actively work towards a collective goal. And truly empowering supporters means that an organisation needs to be willing to give up ultimate control. Not every supporter will be fully "on-message" all of the time; not every user-generated blog post or online video will reflect the exact language that a communications director might prefer. This is the price of giving up control - but it is a small price to pay when the vast organisational benefits of empowering a grassroots army are considered.
Without a doubt, few organisations - political or not - will have the benefit of having a uniquely charismatic, unifying force like Barack Obama to spur mass numbers of ordinary people into action. However, it does not matter if you are a corporation looking to engage your customers as advocates for your product, an educational institution looking to fundraise from your alumni, or a non-profit looking to rally support around a cause, the basic principles of Obama's online strategy - informing, engaging and empowering - can increase the size and intensity of your supporter base. And with the grassroots backing of ordinary people, a campaign, non-profit, company, or cause, can become something much bigger: a movement.


Ben Self is director and founding partner of Blue State Digital - a Washington-based digital media consultancy that was responsible for President Barack Obama's online presidential campaign. Mr Self is speaking at Media 09 in Sydney tomorrow, Febr