Is there anything that the UK news media can learn from the Obama campaign? This is the question of the month for the collection of US and UK journalist/academic bloggers that make up the Carnival of Journalism.
There is certainly loads that UK politicians could learn. They might try to emulate the way that Obama’s team combined ruthless professionalism with social participation. Jack Lail outlines in his blog entry the clever ways that new technology was exploited to bring in new supporters and then harness their enthusiasm to win the primaries and the Presidential elections. He lists the five elements that worked:
- mobile text and email strategy
- YouTube and video
- customer databases
- be where the users are
- enable the communicty
Jack believes that these principles can be applied to the media as well as the politics. I agree.
But there is more. Obama’s online success was driven by a mixture of hard-nosed business acumen and amaterish enthusiasm and idealism. Obama won because he believed in the medium, but also because he had a message.
It is not enough for journalism to just go online. Hillary Clinton and John McCain both had websites and webteams. But they weren’t really online. They did not understand the need to let your digital activists have real responsibility. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to overclaim for the political impact of what the online Obama campaign achieved. His machine was still ruthlessly controlled from head office and there were no real policy impacts from his online cheerleaders. But overall it has created a network of people who have invested in his campaign and who will want to continue the relationship.
That is the lesson for UK media. Start the conversation online. But understand that once you take to all these new platforms and make all these new connections, things will change. People will expect more and you have to be ready to share power and deliver new rewards.
Hi Charlie,
Very interesting post. I think you are right to be cautious about over-claiming regarding the online impact.
We probably will never know the real answer. Obama’s online profile and activities could actually have hurt him more than it helped (ie, he could have won with an even greater margin with better online activities). For every online vote-generating success, there were videos of his preacher spewing venom, Obama stumbling without a teleprompter or Obama Girl (and others) perhaps emphasising his celebrity appeal more than his substance.
And… probably the most successful video on YouTube that put Obama in the mainstream headlines for the first time was the amazing ‘vote different / Apple / 1984’ video that Obama distanced himself from (the creator also resigned from his consulting firm). It was the video that I saw that made me want to learn more about Obama, but the candidate had very little to do with it and may have preferred for it not to have existed.
That being said — none of that should stop people from assessing from their own perspective whether Obama did a good online job or not. But his victory, I think, will invariably cloud most people’s perspectives to some degree. We are probably prone to assuming he did everything right because he won. Whereas I recall Howard Dean really brought the internet into campaigning, but he lost. So did Ron Paul.
Obama spent much more on TV and radio adverts than online advertising. As I wrote earlier today: Thanks to Ofcom he could not have done the same in the UK. So in more ways that one your final message is dead-on: ‘start the conversation online’.
Take care,
Russ