Discover Magazine Interview With the Brains Behind the Obama Internet Campaign By Jan Mel Poller
The October, 2013 issue of Discover Magazine has an interview titled “Harper Reed: Game Changer”. Discover will not put it online for several months. The quotes in the article are from the article.
The article is an overview of what they did to get people to be active, to get out the vote and to elect Barak Obama. There are statements that bring into question the role of Internet sites like Facebook, Twitter, email providers and Google. There are many unasked and unanswered questions.
Q (Discover Magazine): Was it the technology itself that was transformational?
A (Harper Reed): l think the real innovation was the team, not the technology and the decision to bring people in-house from outside of politics. Previous campaigns had mostly outsourced technology to political vendors like Blue State Digital, a tech company that cut its teeth on Howard Dean’s [failed presidential] Campaign in 2004. In contrast, we brought people in from Google, from Facebook, from Twitter and from companies all around Chicago. We didn’t want inventors or visionaries or anyone who was going to make things complicated, We just wanted people to come in, work their hardest, not require us to train them, and to aggressively execute.
Were these people paid while they volunteered to work for the Obama campaign? If so, who paid the salaries? If they were paid by their employers, were their salaries listed as campaign contributions?
Would their employers extended the same privileges if they volunteered for the Republican campaign?
Q (DM): In 2008, the Obama campaign use of social media and online tracking tools expanded the Democratic Party’s data information base by at least tenfold.
A (HR): We spent a lot of time figuring out how to integrate databases that were all over the place.
Did the Democratic Party pay to access this data as would any commercial user such as Amazon? If they didn’t, would the same free terms be offered to the Republican Party?
Q (DM): But when people donated to BarakObama.com, the campaign asked to harvest some of their Facebook data, which meant you had the names at least of the Facebook friends. Or you knew if they responded to Facebook postings or targeted email solicitations about specific issues. Every time someone “liked” Planned Parenthood on Facebook, it registered with the Obama campaign. How was this information used?
A (HR): We also did i: on Twitter on Tumblr and even on Pinterest. We didn’t know everything you were doing on Facebook. But if you shared something or uploaded a picture and tagged it as public, we could look to see what it says. We knew if someone was interested in health care or reproductive rights based on an Internet interaction on Facebook or a response to an email. Essentially we used the technology to make sure you’re the right person to receive a particular message. Then we’d ask people if they wanted to share this message. We’d look through his or her friends and ask, “Who are the most important people for us to share this with?” And from there, we would share with these people, which continuously built our base. So if you were sharing something from the campaign, it would register on Facebook.
And with the content creation, and the postings, we tried to measure things, when you post this, what kind of clicks do you get? On Tumblr how many re-blogs, or on Twitter how many retweets? So if you go lo our Facebook page www.faeebook.com/Bararkobama, you can see the response to postings. One that got posted about an hour ago already has 54,000 likes, and 3,000 people shared it. This way, we know which messages are the most effective.
Could the Republican Party have done the same thing? If not, why not.
A question for the Republicans:
How could you run such an inept campaign? You had 4 years to do what the Democrats were doing. If you couldn’t because the companies wouldn’t let you, you could have raised a fuss about it.
But this wasn’t the only thing. Look at the debate where Candy Crowley had Obama’s answer in advance. Romney looked absolutely startled. Why did he not bring up the bias? Why didn’t he storm off pointing out this bias?
It goes on and on like this. Obama won because of his organization, because he was able to get out the vote.
If the Republicans don’t counter this now, they will not gain the Senate in 2014 and they won’t keep the House, either. And then, 2016 will be a forgone conclusion unless a real catastrophe happens and the people blame the Democrats for it.
Jan Mel Poller
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