The Obamanauts and the Internets
Another excellent article on Obama’s Online Outreach group to make you drool, this time from WaPo.
Highlights:
A year and a half ago, Rospars led a group of 11. It’s easily double that now, with staffers taping signs on the back of their furniture that read, “This is not an extra chair! This chair belongs to . . .” Rospars won’t divulge the total number of people in his team. “We don’t want to give away our entire playbook,” he says.
My understanding from my recent trip to the US was that it was closer to four times this number.
At least nine staffers have contributed to the video team — an astounding figure compared with many mainstream news organizations and past campaigns. (McCain’s aides declined to say how many videographers the campaign has. It has four staffers devoted to Internet activities, and has also hired an outside vendor).
And the investment has had a return:
Together, the videos on Obama’s YouTube channel have been viewed nearly 52 million times, according to TubeMogul.com, which tracks online videos. A viewer watching a video on the channel has an option to click on a “Contribute” button and, using a credit card, donate an amount from $15 to $1,000 using Google Checkout (McCain’s channel, whose videos have been viewed 9.5 million times, doesn’t offer this option.
The article also adds more detail to the emerging story of Obama’s organising via txt message:
Texting is also playing a crucial role in the campaign’s obsession with growing its database. Throughout last year, Goodstein sent at least a dozen texts to collect names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Most important, the message came with “an ask,” meaning users were asked to do something upon receiving it…..
Then as the primaries and caucuses neared, what Goodstein calls “a big experiment” started paying off. One Sunday afternoon in early December, minutes before Oprah Winfrey and Obama addressed about 29,000 people at a rally in Columbia, S.C., Jeremy Bird, Obama’s state field director, asked the crowd to take out their cellphones and text “SC” to 62262, Obama’s short code. The code spells “Obama” on phones.
In the following weeks, Goodstein sent texts to the numbers he’d collected and asked supporters to make phone calls, volunteer in precincts and vote on Jan. 26 in South Carolina. Obama won that state by 28 points.
“South Carolina was a defining moment in what we were going to do with text messaging — not just with young voters but with all voters,” says Goodstein, who spent three weeks there to oversee the texting strategy.
Looks like they’re also doing their own SuperCrunching to measure the effectiveness of different strategies:
There’s a design team that develops content for BarackObama.com, as well as staffers who place ads across the Web to drive people to the site. A group known as the “analytics team” tracks which ad at what time drew the most traffic and what kinds of e-mails from the campaign get opened and read most. Usually campaigns hire outside companies to do this work.
Finally, I really liked the Online Outreach team’s motto:
“Meet the voters where they’re at.”
That’s really what it’s about at the end of the day.
Share This