PubAffairs Blog
Historians confirm: "internet existed before 10 February 2007".
Dan Fox29 November 2008 6:43 PM
During the 1997 General Election, I was lucky enough to be working in the Labour Party Leader’s Office. So crucial was my role, Alastair Campbell decided against revealing it in last year’s bestselling memoirs but, with the passing of time, I think it only right to reveal that Tony Blair’s team, at that pivotal moment in our nation’s democratic history, would have had neither tea made nor letters filed had it not been for me.
Nearly twelve years on, the campaign that brought New Labour to power is still analysed and debated by politicians, strategists, commentators, psephologists and academics. One of the most striking things (other than the high quality hot beverages and innovative correspondence storage/retrieval system) is the practically non-existent role of digital technologies. For it all took place about a year before the world had passed tipping-point in the use of the internet, when most of us still thought that it was home fax machines and the spread of the radio pager which were going to revolutionise political communications.
Those were the days when users of “electronic mail” did not expect a timely reply. So no damage was done when, just before polling day, someone thought to check the office’s main in-box and found a couple of hundred unanswered e-mails.
True, there was a Labour website. And, indeed, when a student wrote in asking about it, the medium in question was deemed so important that her letter was passed on to me to fashion a reply, in between the brewing and filing. Can’t recall my exact response but I do remember getting increasingly frustrated with Word as it insisted on automatically underlining “this three Ws thing” and turning it blue.
So an inchoate website. And some tentative e-mailing. That was it. No daily blogging, on-line networking, soundbite Twittering, .pdf converting, viral marketing, homepage re-directing, video downloading, photo sharing, or SMS updating.
How different from only four years later (when I was a volunteer in the 2001 Labour e-Campaigns Team, texting and uploading with the best of them) and from the election we have recently witnessed in America.
Now a UK Parliamentary election in 1997 cannot truly be compared to a US Presidential election in 2008. Even if plenty are trying. Apparently: Obama = Blair; the Democrats Senate majority = Labour’s Commons landslide; post-Bush/McCain Republicans = post-Thatcher/Major Tories.
In any case, it’s far more fun to flag up some of the differences.
The turnout in our 1997 election was 71%. Labour won 43.2% of the popular vote in what was essentially a four-way battle with the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and a significant set of “others”. Five months later, Tony Blair’s approval rating was 83%.
On 4 November, in the US, turnout was just under 62%. Barack Obama won with 52.3% of the popular vote in a de facto two-horse race. His personal ratings have taken a small dent in the following weeks due to controversy over some cabinet appointments.
So just imagine if we had all had Blackberries in 1997. Labour’s success would have been even greater, yes? Or what if Mark Zuckerberg had not been desperate to meet some girls at Harvard? No doubt Team Obama would have really struggled to rally support, eh? Well, no. These were both extraordinary elections at extraordinary times, led by men of incredible political ability and appeal. Once you allow for that, the impact of information and communications technology is lessened.
At this point, I had better point out that this isn’t some fogeyish rant against the infoweb supermation highnet and the likes of Bookface. Nor am I making a Luddite plea that we did not need “these things” in “my day”. What I do want to do, though, is try and assert some perspective over the (sometimes quite justified) excitement concerning the use of ICT that has greeted the Democratic victory.
To read some reports, you’d have thought that the “Triple O” (Obama’s Online Operation) had invented the worldwide web, unleashing it upon grateful activists and voters when he announced his candidacy on February 10th last year. But if we can get beyond the shock and awe of that digital blitz, then there are some valuable lessons to be learnt, for all campaigners, from the new clickocracy.
Volunteer-centrism
The numbers signed up to MyBO (2 million), the Facebook group (3.2 million) and 15 other such “communities” (nearly another 2 million) are unarguably impressive. But those who argue that Obama won because he managed to get lots of support expressed on social networking (socnet) sites may as well claim that voting itself was an innovation of his campaign.
In fact, the key to the socnet element was that it enabled people to run their own tailored campaigns: building support around certain issues and identities, mutating the logos and slogans, promoting a widening pool of advocates and, in some cases, even acting as a platform for dissent.
Social networking devolved control so that the communicative power of the internet could reach wider and deeper, applying on-line peer pressure, allowing for ever greater interaction, and creating a sense of ownership and enthusiasm whose ultimate expression was pulling the lever marked “D”. As this excellent Fabian analysis puts it, “letting go” is risky for campaign leaders but ultimately very effective.
As long as you get your basic messages, policies and image right in the first place, then socnet is a powerful multiplier.
And end to swiftboating?
In more traditional political terms, rebuttal (and prebuttal) tactics obviously benefit greatly from the speed and ubiquity of the internet (and, indeed, are made infinitely more necessary for the same reason). The swiftboating of John Kerry in 2004 scarred Democrats with similar wounds to those still carried by Labour politicians here over Neil Kinnock’s 1992 lightbulbing.
From an early stage, Obama ensured that smears could be confronted almost at source, mainly by huge advertising spending with Google and probably a lot of Googlebombing, too. Search for a popular accusation against the now President-elect, and the first links listed will be sites rebutting it. Also, the large on-line networks of supporters meant quick and easy dissemination of contributions to sites such as Factcheck and Wikimedia.
Let’s face it, there’s nothing more satisfying than when someone sends a chain e-mail round full of myths and half-baked analyses and you “reply all” with a link that deconstructs the nonsense.
Turning dribbles into a cascade
The simplicity of internet giving, coupled with the popularity and stickiness of the socnet sites, meant being able to rely upon small, incremental donations from large numbers of people: 3 million donors making 6.5 million donations of which over 90% were in less than $100 instalments.
However – and here lies the real significance - in terms of individual low-value donors to Obama, the number is comparable to those supporting George W. Bush in 2004. It was the “dribble donors” which ended up giving higher-value donations bit-by-bit that really led to the record levels of fundraising.
So the donating was pretty conventional in terms of the final amounts raised. The innovation came in the incrementality, enabled by a convenient, continually engaging, foot-in-the-door approach which was perfectly suited to the campaign’s internet presence.
The palm tops were more important than the desktops
When a Presidential candidate releases the news of his VP pick at 3 am in the morning via text message and completely (and deliberately) misses the deadlines for newspaper print editions, you know that something has shifted in the way that politicians communicate. 26 words. The push of a button. And he’d made a connection with nearly 3 million people.
That gambit in August added hundreds of thousands of mobile phone numbers to what was already an impressive contacts database (the Triple O remains tight-lipped about how many phone numbers they really had in the end). Obama was also the first to set up a two-way service, to receive and answer questions (with mixed results).
This is more effective than other communications because the mobile phone is the most ubiquitous and the most social of new technologies. Always with you, it is easy to share its content immediately with whomever you are having a beer, grabbing lunch, watching TV, travelling, meeting, or socialising in any way. By the final two weeks of the campaign, viral texts were being forwarded around voters, along with alerts and reminders about Obama’s appearances and rallies. In one case, this helped to get 100,000 people along to a rally in the election battleground of Denver, Colorado. To a much lesser degree, but in the same way, Twitter also played its part.
On 4 November (and before, in early voting states), text messages reminded subscribers where their polling station was and directed them to the nearest staging posts for get-out-the-vote efforts.
Although not the first time that texting had had a significant role in a democratic election (in March 2004, albeit in extreme political circumstances, the Spanish election may have turned on SMS), the scale and organisation was unusually effective in replicating socnet’s multiplying of peer pressure, enthusiasm and a sense of ownership.
It’s really about governing and re-election
Untangling the cause and effect from all this will keep the Republicans and behavioural targetters happy for years. Everyone else is moving on to government.
In modern politics, effective two-way communication is an indivisible part of making and implementing policy. The array of technology tools that defined the election, will now be used to define the process of governing and underpin re-election in four years.
Mr President’s personal use of them ensures he is relatively well-exposed to the outside world and can counter the “splendid isolation” from which previous Chief Executives have suffered. Meanwhile, his administration can be less reliant on traditional media outlets, and connect directly with citizens. They are going to be able to sell policies wholesale without having to worry about the retailers repackaging the goods. That might be especially useful when legislation gets stuck in Congress and they need to get supporters in a specific locality to exert pressure on their representative.
The transition website, change.gov, the YouTubed radio addresses, and the continuing use of Flickr are already setting the tone for this approach; and, once the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are firmly in his pocket, Obama is pledged to a five-day on-line consultation period before the signing of any non-emergency legislation.
Will we see widespread “grassroots governing”, as many are predicting? Probably not as extensively as expected. But citizen participation (which was not invented by the Triple O but was certainly made a lot easier by it) now continues in the post-euphoria, pre-delivery phase. And maybe it can shorten the delivery time so that more is done in the two years before campaigning starts again; and therefore extend the enthusiasm to once again inspire voters in November 2012.
We still can’t ignore McLuhan
It is nearly 45 years since Marshall McLuhan asserted that the medium is the message, meaning that the way we acquire information, affects us more than the information itself. He divided the effects of different media into “hot” and “cool”, based on the participation or involvement felt when experiencing them. Books, he argued, were “hot”. Telephones were “cool” (see above!). The coolest of all was, of course, TV – which is something with which, for all the opportunities that the internet offered, Obama agreed. Why else spend $5 million in the final week to make your closing arguments in a half-hour slot on seven broadcast and cable channels?
McLuhan died in 1980 and while his theories (prophecies?) still inspire controversy, he would have felt wholly vindicated by the spread and use of digital technologies, conferring as they do a number of new features that can lower a medium’s cultural temperature, such as the recency of its inception, its design, and the functionality. The Triple O’s activities had these (and the participatory factor) in spades. From the first steps into socnet, through the Obama 08 iPhone Application (which was also a frighteningly sophisticated data-miner), and in to on-line gaming, where the campaign paid for advertisements to appear within games played on X-Box Live once early voting had started.
Not only does using something new and being the first to do it in a certain context, generate publicity; even more importantly, the use of technology, regardless of what it is used for, projects a positive image of, inter alia, trendsetting, creativity, ability and understanding of the modern world. This is particularly true amongst the young where Obama was always likely to beat John McCain but in which the 66% to 31% advantage enjoyed by the Democrat amongst under-30s again points to a powerful multiplying effect.
Ultimately, there is probably little that John McCain could have done to counteract this. Technology could have helped him but it has to be deployed carefully. As McLuhan also pointed out, sometimes it is probably best to stick to “hot” media. Like Richard Nixon in the 1960 televised presidential debates against the glacial JFK, being “hot” in a “cool” medium just makes things worse if you do not really understand it.
So, again, technology is significant but you must get the basics right first.
S (as I believe the kids say) FW?
It is fair to say that the scale of Obama’s technological organisation may not be relevant to the day-to-day public affairs grind. Few, if any, of us are likely to need or be able to match the engagement required to win a national popular vote in the world’s most powerful nation!
But leave aside the depth of the Triple O, and take heed of its basics, as set out by one of its coordinators (and a Facebook co-founder), Chris Hughes:
“What we've learned…is that there's huge potential for people that haven't been involved in politics to discover that, yes, this is something that impacts me…the fundamental premise was to help put the political process into people's own hands. That was the value from the start of the campaign, that was the value at the end of the campaign, and it's not going away.”
Now replace “politics” with your current issues and “political process” with your own activity. What you are left with are some new, yet tested, principles for more effectively identifying, planning, organising and delivering your lobbying and campaigns.
Dan Fox is an independent public affairs trainer, adviser and writer - and a Director of QE Ltd, which supports campaign delivery through a range of services, now listed at its unique eBay store, The QE Campaign Toolbox.
Polling is not for the birds (parakeets excepted).
Dan Fox15 April 2009 7:05 AM
One of my favourite West Wing moments is the meeting between a reluctant President Bartlet and a flashy opinion pollster who claims that ...
Treading a line between research and stalking.
Dan Fox23 February 2009 2:58 PM
As a quick follow-up to my previous post on nano-campaigning, it is worth noting that social media has a further significance in terms of trad...
Think big, act small. It’s time to start nano-campaigning.
Dan Fox19 February 2009 5:48 PM
In the title of his 1973 book, criticising technological progress and financial growth, econom...
There's a difference between throwing a temper tantrum and gaining influence.
Dan Fox09 January 2009 5:43 PM
My niece is an expert in persuasion and influence. Derren Brown? You have nothing on her. Some more chocolate buttons? Staying up a half hour later? Another go with her favo...
Is it time for public affairs to wag its long tail?
Dan Fox12 November 2008 2:34 PM
One of the odder by-products of the banking collapse has been the confidence with which we can all now hold forth on the intricacies of the international business system.
Analysing the consequences of securiti...
