The Salon story is a textbook "what George Bush/Barack Obama/John McCain knows about you" approach to the topic, of the kind we've seen on a pretty regular basis since 2004. Let's start the nitpick from the beginning:

About every week or so, you get an e-mail from Barack Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, or top deputy Steve Hildebrand, or maybe Obama himself. They're breezy and informal, addressing you by first name at the outset (before they ask you to donate money at the end). But that's just the beginning.

You know, of course, that Obama has your e-mail address. You may not have realized that he probably also has your phone number and knows where you're registered to vote -- including whether that's a house or an apartment building, and whether you rent or own. He's got a decent estimate of your household income and whether you opened a credit card recently. He knows how many kids you're likely to have and what you do for a living. He knows what magazines and catalogs you get and whether you're more apt to get your news from cable TV, the local newspaper or online. And he knows what time of day you tend to get around to plowing through your in box and responding to messages.

The 5 million people on Obama's e-mail list are just the start of what political strategists say is one of the most sophisticated voter databases ever built.

 

There is nothing technically wrong with these claims, but conflating Obama's 5 million person email list (thanks to Mike Madden for confirming its size) with microtargeting is a bit of a stretch. To get on Obama's email list, all you have to give is your e-mail and ZIP code. Campaigns keep this registration process fairly simple to attract the most possible signups. But as a result, it is nearly impossible to match these records to consumer data without something more concrete, like a first & last name, and hopefully a street address.

Is Obama sending you emails tailored to your individual tastes, beyond simple registration or demographic preferences? Unlikely. E-mail is the cheapest form of communication, and so it's not necessarily cost-effective to microtarget. I also have not encountered an Obama national email circulated on the Internet that is different than the versions I have personally received. You microtarget on stuff that's expensive, like phones.

Madden goes on to claim that Obama's operation is far more sophisticated than Bush-Cheney 2004:

The sheer scale of the operation -- because of Obama's large network of supporters and heavy emphasis on field organizing -- means the data can be sliced in ways that the Bush-Cheney campaign couldn't have dreamed of in 2004. It's most likely also more advanced than what either side did in the 2006 elections, or, for that matter, what John McCain is doing now.

Is this Obama's campaign vastly more capable in the microtargeting realm than Bush's was? I can't tell from this article. That's because the processes it describes were either around in 2004 or are relatively rudimentary Web technologies embedded in most technology platforms, including Drupal, which runs TechPresident.

This gives us a basic primer on what microtargeting is:

All that data gathered in one place may seem a little spooky, though the average credit card company already has it and then some. Ultimately, the approach is about greater sophistication and efficiency. It means the campaign may not wind up wasting time contacting people who are probably voting for McCain, and that when Obama aides or volunteers go out looking for supporters, they have a pretty good idea of what issues those potential supporters care about most. It's the political equivalent of what big corporate marketers have been doing for years: If you're a baby boomer living in Westchester County, N.Y., golf gear catalogs will show up in your mailbox, but if you're a 20-something living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, you might get a free trial of Spin magazine instead. Now the same goes for politics -- if you're in a demographic that makes you statistically likely to have children, Obama might send you an e-mail about education policy instead of one about taxes.

No argument here. Just thought it would be helpful to have in for your benefit.

What goes into these microtargeting files?

if you've ever registered a product -- a TV, a computer or a microwave, for example -- chances are the campaign knows you own it. Likewise, they know if you've signed up for the frequent customer club at your local Whole Foods, or if you've joined the American Civil Liberties Union. (Yes, those last two probably make you an Obama supporter). Or whether you own a gun and have a current hunting license. (An indicator you're less likely to pull the lever for him in November.)

But as a Democratic strategist (wisely) explains none of these variables alone tell us much. Yes, the campaign may "know" you own a particular model TV -- actually, something that granular may be abstracted into some broader, more useful variable given the multitude of TVs out there -- but it's not like they're using it to spy on you. It's just a blip in a dataset somewhere that no one will likely every physically set eyes on.

"People get hung up looking for a silver bullet," said Ken Strasma, a Democratic consultant whose firm, Strategic Telemetry, worked on more than 100 races in 2006 and is mining data for Obama now. "They want to know, is it cat owners or bourbon drinkers or some nice buzz phrase like that. It's when you see the interactions between hundreds of different data points [that patterns emerge] -- it's rare that you see one single indicator pop."

Now, it gets interesting. Madden starts getting into the meat of how Obama may have built a better mousetrap:

Now Obama's campaign is aiming to be ahead of even the GOP's standard in applying sophisticated data mining techniques across the board, supported by all the traditional canvassing, door-knocking and other work it's been doing. The campaign is collecting some of the most helpful data on its own. For example, aides can track what time you open e-mails from them, and if you show a consistent pattern, they'll start sending them at around that time of day. "The marginal benefit of sending some people an email at 2 o'clock vs. 3 o'clock vs. 4 o'clock might not make sense [at first]," said Michael Bassik, a Democratic consultant with MSHC Partners, the firm that did John Kerry's online advertising in 2004. "But once you start getting an e-mail list that's 3 million, 4 million, or 10 million people, increasing the returns for a fundraising e-mail by 5 or 10 percent means additional returns of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars."

There are no specifics on how Obama is using door knocks to enhance microtargeting, so this claim is difficult to evaluate (I can tell you this concept is not exactly unknown in Republican circles, though). But the bit about timing emails is interesting.

Could Obama be timing his emails to different segments of his list depending on when they open? It's definitely an interesting possibility, and definitely doable (though a lot of work). The other day, Soren forwarded me an email he had received from Obama at 6 in the morning. I received the same email at around 8. Being more of a night owl, I guess that could explain it -- but it's also true that sending to a 5 million person list is a massive task that takes several hours, so the discrepancy isn't prima facie evidence of anything. If the send-timing thing is true, it's very smart. At a minimum, campaigns should send at times of day when supporters are statistically more likely to open (usually 9am), and send first to the people most likely to take action.

This starts getting into the mundane:

If you're one of the 1 million people who have a login on Obama's social networking site, they know how often and when you visit, and they can use that to gauge how committed you are to the campaign. A few months ago, the campaign sent out a three-page survey asking people about their voting habits, how often they go to church, which groups and issues they identify with and whether they've given money to political candidates in the past. The point of all of the online gadgetry is to get people to show up for offline events. "We've tried to orient the tools less as a social network and more as a mobilization network," said Joe Rospars, Obama's online director. "We're creating opportunities for people to get out there and do things -- the campaign is election-outcome oriented."

Wow! A website that tracks when you've logged in, how long you've been, and how often you come back. Psst, but the rest of us techies call that an access log! There is nothing remarkable about this technology. What is rarer is people using it effectively. My dashboard on My.BarackObama.com tells me my rank based on my (limited) activity on the site, and having logged in a few times, blogged once, set up a fundraising page for demonstration purposes, and joined a couple of groups, I am ranked 88,432nd, or in the top 10%. This is just a matter of reading rows from a database and assigning a point value for each one. You can see my access log below:

I've also analyzed how My.BarackObama.com is driving people to take action offline. But the point is that this is hardly new and innovative. Both Bush and Kerry had systems like this in '04, and this type of activity streaming comes standard with most social networking platforms nowadays.

Finally, and this is credit-worthy, is this bit:

Offline, volunteers are canvassing neighborhoods where they think they'll find supporters, or getting contact info at Obama's big rallies, picking up chunks of similar data. Unlike with previous campaigns, Obama's aides dump all the information they get into one centralized database. So if you give the campaign $50 from an online solicitation, then show up at a rally organized offline, the campaign knows that. Likewise, if you join Obama's Facebook group (approximately 1 million strong), then later buy an Obama '08 umbrella, aides file that away for possible use later.

The part about centralized databases is big, and not to be underestimated. But without being able to peek under the hood, it's hard to tell whether this is more or less sophisticated than what, say, the RNC has -- as they've been dealing with the same issues at a very high level of complexity. Getting different databases to sync up properly is a big challenge, and if Obama has figured out a fix, hats off to them.

The part about Facebook is likely a generalization. It is impossible to harvest Facebook fan or group data and the existing technologies don't let you get into the nitty-gritty of who joined what groups, or more aptly, who signed up on Obama's page. It is impossible to vector this data (beyond simply knowing that someone is signed up on Facebook) with in-house data, which is one of the frustrations of using Facebook for political organizing -- they own the data, not the campaign.

A broader point to be made about articles like this is that they emphasize the whiz-bang aspects of microtargeting: here's a segment of Whole Foods-loving Obama umbrella owners!  But those narrow segments are rarely of use to a real-world campaign. Used properly, microtargeting is all about mining of data points to categorize people into broad buckets (R, D, I) or (social / economic / national security conservative) when the existing methods fail (hard ID, survey responses, party registration, etc.)

As I've written before, there is a danger in over-segmenting the electorate. And this is where microtargeting goes wrong. If you're using the technology to divine minute differences between 80 different segments of the electorate and then sending them 80 different messages, you need your head examined. This is Mark Penn's microtrends gone amuck. Not only are you wasting time with 20 or 30 times amount of work you need to be doing, but if you try to communicate everything, you end up communicating nothing. As brilliant as the Obama/Bush microtargeting model is, both candidates understood the power of central, unifying messages that cut through the clutter. Why is the word most associated with Obama "change"? Message discipline!

A better model for microtargeting is to use it to find your One True Supporter. Say that we know that the ideal Obama donor is a Mac-addled, latte-sipping urbanite. Then throw all your resources at finding more of those people (a successful application of this would have been both parties trolling the iPhone lines for new tech talent), rather than persuading reluctant middle aged moms to join the ranks. Done right, microtargeting can be used to reinforce your one true brand, rather than splinter it.

Obama is getting lots of credit for allowing this kind of thing to go on under his digital roof, most prominently from the Jay Rosens and Jeff Jarvises of the world.

But this development is more properly seen as a natural evolution in any open, networked system that is allowed to operate in the political space. The credit belongs to his supporters, not Obama.

It's now a truism that when presented with an open platform, users will hack it to serve their purposes, not necessarily those of the sponsor. Many times, those two sets of priorities are intertwined (e.g. supporters desire to get involved matched with a campaign's need for volunteers), though in this case, they weren't.

The Obama camp had little choice in the matter. MyBO is a goose laying some pretty golden eggs, and to practice blatant censorship would endanger the gusher of cash and volunteers it's helped generate. Also, I suspect if you asked them privately, they'll say they love that this is happening. Why? Because the controversy and meta-coverage drives more people to use the tools. How many progressives signed up for MyBO this week just to join this group and will stick around to help elect Obama in the fall? At the end of the day, only one metric matters: unique visitors.

As intruiging as this is, however, there is a danger that we'll use a superficial semblance of openness to give the Obama campaign a pass on the key issue: whether Obama is actually responding to this protest in any meaningful way. Isn't that the point of having these tools, after all? That the candidate will actually listen and maybe even modify his policies as a result?

Jarvis nails it when he writes,

Now if a campaign is going to argue that it’s truly grassroots, what is it to do with a revolt or protest from within? I’ve argued since Howard Dean’s run in 2004 that campaigns aren’t or can’t really be bottom-up when it comes to policy. They are necessarily propagandistic: This is what the candidate says. Indeed, Dean’s supporters acted like white blood cells in his blog discussions quite effectively surrounding and strangling dissent and opponents in the bloodstream. That’s the way campaigns have to work if you’re going to decide what this guy stands for and whether to vote for him, right? It’s about the message, no?

But for a "movement" that professes to be "bottom-up" ("we are the change we've been waiting for") this poses a significant test. Is Obama actually a leader in his own right, or a vessel for the aspirations and policy preferences of his supporters? If he gets in, won't he ultimately have to make some big decisions alone or with his closest advisors, in the solitude of the Oval Office?

Obama has professed his desire to bring openness and transparency to government. This may mean things like policy wikis and features like No. 10's online petitions area. What happens when newly disempowered Republicans call Obama's bluff and start flooding these tools, and Obama is forced to ignore their suggestions. "Bottom up" government is suddenly going to look a whole lot better to conservatives, and Obama may look like a hypocrite for ignoring the wishes of his constituents.

As intriguing as the anti-FISA group is, it may be a little more than a fig leaf if Obama is going to allow these tools to function as a backwater while he keeps doing what he was going to do anyway in the foreground.

MyBO is often credited in mainstream media with helping build Obama's remarkable volunteer operation. At the same time, the conventional wisdom among webbies is that internal social networks don't work. Nobody wants to create yet another profile (particularly on a site with such a limited audience), and best to concentrate your energies on existing social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. 

My initial runthrough found many ways in which MyBO failed to live up to the hype, including:

• The friending feature, which is at the core of most social networks, is nearly useless. I may have been a stranger in a strange land, but I couldn't find anyone on the site whom I'd have liked to "friend." By contrast, today's nichiest social networks, like Brightkite, Mento, and FriendFeed, make it easy to find dozens of people you already know by offering a contact importer (where you import your Gmail/Yahoo/AOL/etc. address books to see who else is already online). Chris Hughes, MyBO's primary manager (and Facebook co-founder) only has 153 friends, the network average for all of Facebook.
• User blogs seems like kind of a throwaway feature. There is a single page with the latest posts in reverse chronological order, and that's pretty much it in terms of discoverability -- no posts in the sidebar of every MyBO page or latest comments as in Drupal/Scoop/SoapBlox. There have also only been 11,460 user blog posts off a base of over 800,000 user accounts, suggesting most people don't waste their time with maintaining a blog on the site. By contrast, in the first two weeks of The Next Right we've produced 480 user blogs from 806 registered users, a more than 1 to 2 ratio of user blogs to users.
• Personal fundraising pages are a really nice touch -- but not a game-changer in terms of money raised. The largest groups on the site had only raised in the hundreds of dollars for Obama. Even if we're charitable and allow $1 million raised through all such pages, that's a drop in the bucket compared to the tens of millions raised through e-mail, the website, and Google AdWords landing pages. This may be an example of the vaunted "long tail" being a great talking point but little more. People still find it easiest to give based on a direct appeal from the top. 

Despite all this, My.BarackObama.com still works, and it's not because recreated the features of a social network. If they've succeeded, it's because they've harkened back to the early days of the web, to the primary way that the online grassroots connected with each other before blogs: e-mail groups.

Groups are probably MyBO's most powerful feature, with over 16,000 of them created. Most crucially, there are 6,639 local Obama groups. You won't see many mega-groups of the "Million Strong" variety. But you will see local activist groups in virtually every state -- often at the county and town level -- with hundreds of members each. Bucks County for Obama, Colorado Springs for Obama, Philly for Obama, and Tucson for Obama are just a few that reach that threshold.

When one joins the groups, it's not just a casual connection. You are automatically opted in for a discussion list a la a Yahoo or a Google group, the underlying feature set of which has not changed since the late '90s. In fact the title of this post is a throwback to that era, to the eGroups service (that later became Yahoo Groups) that I used to create the Bush 2000 mailing list that is still in existence today. This isn't rocket science. This stuff been around for more than a decade.

For group creators, the ability to mass message all your group's members is the key value proposition behind social networking groups. This why groups with up to 1,200 members on Facebook are useful and can get a response as powerful as e-mail -- but you turn into a pumpkin once you reach 1,200 and messaging is shut off. 

MyBO is even more powerful because the messaging is not one-way -- it's a community where anyone can reply. And the messages contain useful information for the local activist -- reminders about local events, news from activists campaigning for delegate slots, even links to on-message videos -- all in the most familiar format available: e-mail. I've reproduced a sample message from my local Falls Church for Obama group below.

When you think about it, this is the kind of networking feature that it makes sense for campaigns to offer. Unlike a Facebook, your sense of connection to an e-group is not tied to the underlying technology but to the group itself. It doesn't matter as much if it's a Yahoo Group, a Google Group, or an Obama group, just as long as the right people are on it. By building it, you're not competing with a platform with millions of users, but for groups of hundreds.

Hosting it on the campaign site also weeds out the non-Obama groups you'd find at a Google or a Yahoo. This is useful to the user. And it directs people to locally based activism. That's smart.

GENERATION OBAMA DC/VA UNITY UPDATE
(please forward!)

As you heard, I'm running for Obama Male Delegate to the DNC!  Help me in my quest to have more supporters on my groups than my female counterpart Chrisi West from Alexandria/Fairfax territory (the current Facebook score is Jim 64-Chrisi 63).

The winner gets a '78 Chevy Nova!

Sign up ASAP....the convention is Saturday!
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=29654839080
http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/4lsp

And since I have a comfy 1 Friend lead over Chrisi, sign up for her group too because she's the most enthusiastic young Hope Monger in the state and because delegates are divided by gender so I don't have to run against her!
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=17301473667

In other news, we had a great Generation Obama meeting on Monday night with over 70 attendees!

We will be organizing the structure better in the coming days, as we compile email addresses, ideas, etc. and can send follow up updates.

In the meantime, the Publicity Committee has already scored one success....Voter Registration Night at Nationals Park!  We're in the preliminary stages, but there's lots of enthusiasm from the Nats' publicity office....so stay tuned.

For those who want to get involved, Generation Obama will have a Volunteer & Meeting Night on Monday and a Fundraising Meeting on Tuesday.

See you soon!

Jim

Obama Activities:

*** Sign Up To Host A 6/28 United For Change Party! ***
http://my.barackobama.com/unite
(email me if you want to share the event in my updates)

*** June 13 Reception with Campaign Manager David Plouffe ***
When: Friday, June 13, 2008, 6:30 PM (6 PM VIP Strategy Session)

Where: Capital City Brewery, 2 Massachusetts Ave, NE (steps from Union Station)

Details: Mr. Plouffe has run a smart and effective campaign, and he will be on hand to discuss and answer questions about the strategy thus far and the plan for the months ahead.  This is one event you don't want to miss!

Price: $150 for General Admission, $500 for the VIP Strategy Session

Sign up online now:
https://donate.barackobama.com/page/contribute/DCJune13?custom3=Jim+McBride

*** 6/14 Virginia Victory '08 Volunteer Day for Obama-Warner-Moran! ***
10am-4pm
Saturday, June 14
(come anytime to help with a 2 hour shift)

Arlington Democratic Headquarters
2009 North 14th St.
Arlington, VA 22201
(one block away from Court House Rd,
near the orange line metro and Rt. 50 exit)

Help the 8th Congressional Distict candidates with Door-to-Door Canvassing, Voter Registration, Volunteer Calls and more.

Please RSVP!
http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/4qj3
OR
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=54383835025
OR
Matt Robinson
xxxxxxx@vavictory08.org
703-xxx-xxxx (office)

*** June 14-15 DC for Obama Canvasses for Donna Edwards ***

From DC for Obama Czar, Ian Martinez: As we enjoy the brief period of rest between clinching the nomination and the next phase, there's a local race right across the District line in Maryland that needs our attention.  After winning a thrilling primary in February, Donna Edwards now faces the Republican in a special election.  While P.G. County is traditionally Democratic, there is a fear that low turnout in next Tuesday's election could make it much closer than any of us want.  Getting out there to canvass will also keep our skills sharp for the general without having to travel far.  One of many reasons to be active for Donna is that she will be a real leader in the quest for DC voting rights and an end to the shameful Taxation Without Representation in DC.

This weekend is the crucial time for GOTV efforts for the Edwards campaign.  Interested DCFO volunteers are being asked to show up at 4301 Garden City Drive Landover, MD 20785.  We're meeting in the basement of the UFCW building Saturday at 10am and Sunday at 1pm to put up doorhangers. The building is across from the New Carrollton Metro on the Rt. 50 side.  If you'd like to help put a real progressive in Congress, please email me at xxxxx@gmail.com

*** 6/14-15 Capital Pride Volunteers Needed! ***

This weekend's Metro-DC Capital Pride celebration is one of Washington DC's largest annual community events.  Our local Metro DC Obama Pride organizers need your help (especially our straight allies) to ensure maximum visibility, voter education, community organizing and fundraising at this event.  Capital Pride is our best and most exciting opportunity to mobilize the local LGBT community before the November election and we need our help!

CAPITAL PRIDE PARADE - Saturday, June 14   6:30 PM
Volunteers should report at 5 PM to the parade staging area:  Francis Jr. High  (24th & N, NW)

The Saturday night Pride Parade marches throughout the Dupont and Logan Circle neighborhoods.  This year's exciting parade will consist 5,000 marchers (representing 81 contingents) and will be watched by over 25,000 people along the parade route.

We will be marching in the parade and selling T-shirts along the parade route.    Marchers, rally sign distributors and street sales team volunteers needed!  Wear Obama gear -- wear comfortable shoes!

Sign up to help at this event!
   On MyBO          http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/4vsc
   On Facebook   http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/event.php?eid=20724282649

CAPITAL PRIDE FESTIVAL - Sunday, June 15   11 AM to 6 PM
Volunteers should report at 10:30 AM to the Festival Entrance (Pennsylvania & 7th NW)

This years Pride Festival will attract over 200,000 participants - most are progressive democratic voters and supportive.  The Obama Pride booth will be our base for distributing literature, signing up supporters, and selling Obama Pride merchandise.   In addition, we need help clipboard canvassing the crowd.  Veteran canvassers, straight allies and friendly LGBT members are especially needed to adequately connect with this volume of people.  PLEASE HELP IF YOU CAN ... even if it's just for a couple hours in the afternoon!

Sign up to help at this event!
   On MyBO          http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/4vsx
   On Facebook   http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/event.php?eid=16227379386

*** 6/16 Generation Obama & "Build The Hope" Volunteer Outreach Night ***

6:00-9:00pm Monday, June 16th
Courtland Towers (Party Room)
1200 N Veitch St.
Arlington, VA 22201
(off 13th St., one block away from Court House Rd near the orange line metro and Rt. 50 Exit)

After our Generation Obama kickoff meeting there are several committees and projects in the works, so come by to get involved as meet to discuss and work on several young voter outreach initiatives!

We also will begin outreach to volunteers of all ages via our "Build The Hope" database, which includes calls, data entry and random organizing tasks.

This is a party room without land lines or PCs, so please bring your cell phone (with charger if needed) and even a laptop if you can!

RSVP:
http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/4gbfh

OR

Jim McBride
xxx@yahoo.com
703-xxx-xxxx

*** 6/17 Generation Obama Fundraising Meeting ***
6:30pm Tuesday, June 17th
Bailey's Pub & Grille (Ballston Mall)
4238 Wilson Boulevard
Arlington, VA 22201

Join us as we develop fundraising ideas that will encourage young people to contribute to the campaign!

Students For Barack Obama and Young Lawyers For Obama are welcome!
Sample Events:
- "Sing for Obama!" karaoke fundraisers
- "Bid On Your Crush FOR Obama!" date auction
- "All in for Obama!" poker tournament
- "Stand Up For Barack!" comedy night
- "Bands for Barack!" music shows
- Debate and Convention Watching Parties
- "Basketball for Barack!" or "Kickball for Obama!" or other sports tournaments

You can also host a low-dollar happy hour, house party, picnic or BBQ on your own!

Please RSVP!
http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/4gbst

Contact:
Kezia Williams xxx@yahoo.com
Jim McBride xxx@gmail.com 703-xxx-xxxx

DIRECTIONS
Driving: From Route 66's Exit 71 or Route 50's Glebe Rd exit, take Glebe toward the Mall and find parking inside. From Ballston's Orange Line Metro: Walk from Fairfax Drive past the IHOP to Randolph and make a right. The mall is two blocks away.

***6/21 Party for Obama! ***
(come hear some fire from the choir...)

We all know that Barack has shattered fundraising records but as David Plouffe's email from Friday June 6th explained John McCain and the RNC raised nearly $45 million last month. The message is clear we must all dig deep to contribute to ensure that Barack has the needed resources to compete this fall, and protect himself from the slanderous allegations which are a sure result of all that RNC money. So why not get your money's worth and enjoy a fun night out with family and friends and this great community fundraiser? All contributions go directly to the campaign from the campaign website so don't delay and get you "tickets" today.

Don't forget there is going to be a Gospel Choir and they are FIRED UP and READY TO GO TURN VA BLUE!  Come CELEBRATE the end of the Primary and the beginning of the General Election.

Get fired up with local gospel singers, community leaders, and Obama's vision for a new century.  Senator Obama does not rely on corporate lobbyists and special interest groups to fund his campaign. He relies on us. Our support will help spread his message of HOPE. Together, we can achieve real change in this country.

Join the movement: Saturday, June 21 7:00 PM
Swanson Middle School
5800 Washington Blvd,
Arlington, 22205

For Tickets Donate:

Adults $30/18-25 $20 Advance Purchase
Adults $35/18-25 $25 At the Door

Consider Joining Our Host Committee

Host..........................

........$100
Change Agent......................$250
Unite America.......................$500
Save the World....................$1000

For Tickets Go To:
www.shurl.org/Obama

Please contact Evan Day with questions: xxx@gmail.com

*** 6/26 DC for Obama Meetup ***

Join with the grassroots leaders! DC for Obama will have a free "Meetup" on June 26, upstairs in the Obama Room at the Hawk & Dove, 329 Pennsylvania SE.  We do not anticipate that this will be as crowded as our last event.  We will have a guest speaker or two and update you on the grassroots Obama Campaign in our region.  Primarily, we will network, socialize and join together to support the campaign, especially in Virginia.  By the way, DC for Obama ESPECIALLY welcomes our fellow Democrats who supported Sen. Hillary Clinton and did such a fantastic job on her history making campaign.  We need you to make real change happen.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This email was sent to 78 members of Falls Church for Obama
This email was sent from James Mcbride  xxx@yahoo.com
Listserv email address: FallsChurchforObama@groups.barackobama.com
Your reply will be sent to: FallsChurchforObama@groups.barackobama.com
Unsubscribe or change your email settings: http://my.barackobama.com/page/group/FallsChurchforObama/listserv-remove

 

 

(Cross-posted to The Next Right.)

Online, it seems to be a different story, at least when it comes the image of John McCain as projected on JohnMcCain.com and in the daily emails that go out under his name. Good online strategy is simple: reflect the very best of your candidate offline. John McCain offline is transparent, accessible, and willing to answer any question. John McCain online is stilted and awkwardly asking me for money. There’s a fundamental disconnect.

The email the McCain camp sent today illustrates the problem. I’m deliberately zooming out because I don’t want you to focus on the copy:

These are recent emails sent by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton:

Even from a distance, it’s night and day. You’ve got brevity and short, rapid-fire paragraphs. They feature a clear call to action above the fold. They’re highly readable, or more to the point, scannable – since the average reader online reads no more than 20% of content. They respect today’s attention-deprived user. Less is more.

Most important is what these messages say about the candidate. These messages were crafted solely for the e-mail channel. I don’t know about you, but the e-mails I get everyday from friends and colleagues look a lot more like Hillary and Barack’s e-mails than they do War and Peace. I’ve even entertained the thought of Obama banging out a few pithy sentences on the MacBook Pro in the hotel suite on the way to the victory party (it’s believable enough). I know that he didn’t, but the fact that I’ve wondered counts for something.

McCain’s e-mail start off with the anachronistic “From the Desk of John McCain” — a 1970s-era direct mail device I haven’t seen on a piece of real stationery in a decade. The haughty phrasing is designed to evoke a sense of prestige — the sense that the person addressing you is Big and Important. But the Internet is not about being Big and Important. It’s about being One of Us. Again: fundamental disconnect. McCain offline gets this, shedding the trappings of the Imperial Presidency. McCain online, not so much.

But that concern pales in comparison to the content. Today’s e-mail, in marked contrast to the short, e-mail-like e-mails from Hillary and Barack, is lifted from speech text. In that he spoke the words, it is him. But it’s not him communicating something unique for the online audience. It’s him or his handlers keeping us at a safe distance using the most formal version of McCain possible – again, the polar opposite of what McCain’s offline strategy is about.

The explanation for why this is actually very prosaic: the approval process. In a short-staffed campaign, the easiest — and sometimes the only — option is to lift from already approved text. Nobody has the time to spend up to 24 hours getting all new text approved by McCain or his closest advisers, by which time the window of opportunity may have passed. And McCain’s signature nets more money than Rick Davis’s, no matter how you word the message. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

In the moment, it all makes sense. The problem is that over time, you wind up cheapening McCain’s personal brand. Maybe I’m being a Steve Jobs-like pie-in-the-sky perfectionist here, but having to play along with the illusion that John McCain sat down at his desk to deliver us gobs of text is demeaning both to us and to McCain. This is not direct mail. We are not some people data-mined off a consumer list who’ve never heard from you before. We opted-in. We are the top 1% — the savviest, most interested, most influential supporters. We get the joke. On the flip side, consider how much Hillary and Obama get simply by seeming real in their e-mails, even if they don’t get to cram in as many policy points.

This may all seem very esoteric, but it’s important. The pixels you see in the Hillary and Barack e-mails fueled the rise of the biggest people-powered fundraising machine in history. It’s worth studying how they do things at a very minute level.

Improvement starts by smashing the desk — and giving us the real McCain.

Anyone who's worked a few election days in Philly knows how colorful things can get. Violence, intimidation, broken machines, and officials denied entry into polling places are par for the course. With more than 1,600 precincts in the city alone, it's difficult to get a handle on it all. Here's hoping a little technology-enabled citizen journalism can bring some much needed transparency to election day.

Follow @ElectionJournal on Twitter to get live breaking updates. And here's a map of the incidents they've uncovered so far:

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Here's what the Clinton app looked like this evening:  

What's most revealing about this is not it's real-time fundraising counter (which is a first for Clinton and something I just knocked Obama on). Rather, it's how it reveals the contrast between grassroots supporters' priorities and the campaign's.

In the campaign's sample Pennsylvania budget, $2.5 million of $3.19 million, or 78%, is devoted to TV advertising. In fact, all but $90,000, or 97% is devoted to push advertising in any medium: TV, radio, or online.

Now, MyPA leaves off a few things. There's no line item for political mail. Or phones. Or for staging events that drive media. And it can cost $750,000 to do Election Day in Philly alone, figuring in the usual $100 payments to committeepeople in each of the city's 1,600 precincts.

Still, while supporters have given 60% of their money to television ads, that's significantly less than the 4/5ths the campaign allocated in this mock budget. All the items that involve person-to-person contact (signs in supporters' yards, vans to drive voters to the polls, and door hangers) are doing much better in meeting their goals than the broadcast advertising-driven goals. Though some of this is related to the modest goals set by the campaign, not all of them are. Supporters more readily met the $25,000 vans goal than they did the $15,000 door hanger goal. That's because there's a clearer value proposition: getting a certain vote out of an elderly supporter driven to the polls rather than another incremental touchpoint achieved by a door-hanger. While the Clinton campaign allocated just 3% to grassroots activities, supporters funded it to the tune of 18% of the money raised so far, or six times as much.

Even with the new online revenue stream, campaign spending patterns have been slow to change. New Media Obama ain't exactly skimping on old-school TV ads, and his comparatively large online spend is fueled by an unexpected surge of extra money, not deliberate planning ahead. A lot of this is due to new media's in-built efficiencies. Because it is usually free to communicate, there is a broad understanding that you can't buy the Web. Obama's extraordinary levels of organic online support did not stem from spending more money, and no candidate could hope to match him simply by spending money. 

The conventional wisdom about television isn't quite this subdued, to put it gently. Advertisers have taken the key insight that saturation advertising beats less-than-saturation advertising or no advertising -- particularly in down-ballot races -- and extrapolate it to mean that the more you spend the better -- no matter how much each side is spending and or the fact of two candidates with 100% name recognition. The logic of mutually assured destruction has taken over. Campaign budgeting is not driven by the relative merit of moving votes on TV vs. through grassroots, but by keeping pace with the Joneses on TV. If you are getting killed on TV, as Hillary is right now in Pennsylvania, you do everything possible to keep Obama from reaching a tipping point through paid advertising. Though tipping points usually come from earned not paid media, you can understand why the worry.

Please know that I'm not hating on TV here. I don't know where you'd spend $3 million online in Pennyslvania, and if you did, it would probably be as inefficient as broadcast TV, and from the campaign's perspective, much more unorthodox. TV is a "safe" place to put your money because it's the only medium that can scale to support the money the mega-campaigns are raising. 

Still, I wonder the Hillary data doesn't leave room for Turk's idea of using online volunteers to mobilize offline, and likely elderly, voters. As shown by the readiness of Hillary supporters to fund vans for the elderly, could you do some big online push to dramatically expand the universe of people identified as needing a ride to the polls? Or involve them in absentee chase, another high-value activity that involves banking certain votes? And because this involves buying expensive microtargeting databases, not just lightweight apps in the cloud, it would move the needle on how the bigger campaign pie is being divvied up.