A few days before the election, Obama's national field director sent an e-mail to tens of thousands of Arizona campaign supporters. Its message was urgent. The race in Arizona is tight; we need your help. If you can volunteer, please visit our website and sign up.
One of those e-mails was forwarded to me, and I duly posted it, deleting the name of the recipient in order to give him some anonymity.
About an hour later, an Obama campaign aide sent me an e-mail, jokingly informing me that they knew my source.
How's that possible, I asked?
Well, all the e-mails were coded. Every time someone clicked through that particular e-mail to the volunteer page, the Obama campaign servers registered whose e-mail had generated the hit.
This was a small but telling example of how the Obama campaign married technology and the psychology of incentives to create a very sophisticated universe of volunteers. They'd taken advantage of a whole new media ecology and built a set of tools to harness the energy of millions of people who were traditionally downstream from political appeals.
MyBarackObama.com, or MyBO, was organized around three principles:
1. Enthusiasm -- Democratic enthusiasm, enthusiasm for the Obama campaign was there, but it had to be stroked and perpetuated;
2. Technology -- text messaging, web 2.0 social networking, geocoding and tagging, etc
3. Approach -- what an Obama aide called "accountable empowerment" -- it allowed volunteers to keep track of what they were doing, allowed their friends to see who was on top, gave them rewards, and more.
Most importantly, MyBO allowed like minded people to contact like minded people, to self-organize into what Republicans call affinity groups.
By the end of the campaign, MyBO claimed 10 million e-mail addresses, with 3 million belonging to contributors and two million of them belonging to active volunteers; more than 30,000 self-organized affinity groups; its YouTubes -- designed to stoke enthusiasm -- generated more than 100,000,000 million hits. Tethered together with the campaign's voter contact efforts and the DNC's Partybuilding software, MyBO was responsible for more than 68,000,000 individuals being contacted by the Obama campaign.
What happens to MyBO and all that networking capital now? It could be merged with the Democratic National Committee - afterall, the 2012 re-elect starts today, and the Obama White House could choose to turn the DNC into an instrument of the White House, much the way that the Bush administration used the RNC from 2001 to 2006. Legally, of course, the list is a thing of value; the White House wouldn't be able to use it directly; perhaps Obama's allies could purchase the list and use it to build an advocacy organization on Obama's behalf.
« Palin To Speak At RGA Event | Main | New Leadership In Both Parties By February » What Happens To MyBO10 Nov 2008 01:47 pm Comments (10)
It is pretty standard for email marketer to know that sort of information about their emails. My organization sent about a million totals emails (all subscription based - no spam here!) last year and I can tell you every recipient's behavior; the numbers of clicks, forwards, what time they open, etc. 
As Nathan Clark said, almost all email marketers do the same thing. In some cases all you have to do is strip off the end part of the URL they give you to defeat their tracking. And, it's people like Ambinder who don't notice such things that help phishing schemes prosper, where someone clicks a link to "ebay" and it goes somewhere else. No big surprise that Ambinder would be in that same category. Nor is it a surprise that he wouldn't be creeped out by any of that which he describes. And, I'm proud to say that I played a part in helping MyBHO succeed. This was serious and the domain name mentioned is real: my.barackobama.com/page/community/blog/nomoreblatherdotcom These two were satires that unfortunately didn't take off: my.barackobama.com/page/community/blog/billhawkins my.barackobama.com/page/community/blog/robertbellaire Note: the Neighbor2Neighbor program at the last link would have had people ratting on their neighbors to the BHO campaign, so I'm surprised that didn't take off.
MyBO just sent me an email asking for a donation to the DNC (in exchange for a victory T-shirt). It has begun. ---------- from Obama for America In the months and years ahead, we're going to accomplish amazing things together. No president has ever had the support of such a powerful grassroots movement, and Barack and Joe will need you to continue fighting alongside them. But before we take the next step, we need to get our house in order. The Democratic National Committee poured all of its resources into building our successful 50-state field program. And they played a crucial role in helping Barack win in unlikely states like North Carolina and Indiana. We even picked up an electoral vote in Nebraska. ---- I hope the machine will continue to help the party in places that were out of reach in this cycle, like here in Mississippi.
The DNC is the rational place to send all this information and functionality. If the DNC website allows my.bo-like functionality, with groups, etc., it could really open up grass roots organizing. I already know of at least one place where a local Obama group is morphing into the local Democratic group where there wasn't one before. Keeping the group functionality (even if it moved to dnc.org or wherever) would help these groups thrive. Also, my.dnc would immediately express the fact that it really is everyone's party now.
Hi Marc, I'm writing a paper on Barack's new media efforts, and I'm wondering where you got some of your numbers. Specifically, where did you find out at MyBo had 10 million email addresses? If you could, please email me at soheil.rezayazdi@gmail.com with a reply. I would very much appreciate it. Soheil.
Marc says: "Legally, of course, the list is a thing of value; the White House wouldn't be able to use it directly." I was under the impression that under McCain-Feingold assets left at the end of a campaign can be used for any lawful purpose, other than being converted to personal use. Does anyone understand Marc's remark?
Great Investment:
if the obama-biden paraphernalia is considered valuable, my primary race stuff should be worth more. i'll have to pack away in tissue paper the second primary campaign yard sign that i didn't use, along with that second primary campaign bumper sticker.
Lets not wait for 2012. How bout we turn that around into an incumbency protection program for the newly elected House Dems in 2010. Even better, how bout we use the infrastructure to help the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races and state legislative races in 2009. We already saw the effect of allowing volunteers from noncompetative states to help in competitive ones; why wouldn't this work for volunteers in states with NO major races help out with states that DO?
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The democrats have to strike a delicate balance here:
If the underdo it, the support will wither a lot. If they overdo it, they risk turning off their supporters with the relentless calls for donations and time given.
I think the emphasis needs to be on community groups / gatherings...
Posted by Joel | November 10, 2008 2:14 PM