Communication for Social Change Consortium

In this interview by Susan Mach, Obama campaigner Jonathan Kopp talks about how social networking and digital information technologies increased youth participation in United States (US) President Barack Obama’s victory in November 2008.


Kopp states that he worked with the 'Obama "brand"' in a campaign that "was disciplined and consistent, never defensive. His message and vision were clear, and he never wavered. The challenge was pushing this positioning out to voters, literally every minute of every day, for 21 months, through the most aggressive, measured and successful social media strategy ever seen in politics, or in consumer brand marketing for that matter." Through research, Kopp's team found high youth voter frustration with the former administration. However, he was careful not to give youth a feeling of being a "voter market": "…[s]o it was important for us to downplay the branding and lay out the facts, and give them the chance to discover it on their own." He focused on voter registration at a "candidate neutral" website. The site, however, was publicised as a solution to frustration with the following issues: Iraq, gas prices, health care, etc. "We made a simple connection: register if you want to make a difference on the issues."


According to Kopp, young people are looking for the information (not the press spin), the tools, and the opportunities to be laid out for them, so they themselves can discover it on their terms and in their timeframe. He used social media so that young people could hear the information from friends. The team used a pragmatic approach of asking for specific action once they had engaged young people. They also captured data on mybarackobama.com: email addresses and telephone numbers. These gave them connections to ask for links to other youth.


On the voter registration site, they used the voice and imagery of youth peer-to-peer conversation, featuring young street artists and headlines that were testimonials of actual young people’s frustrations with the status quo. They created digital, interactive billboards, covering 30 cities in the last 10 nights of the campaign. They focused on urban areas in “battleground” states where many young people lived. They trained a spotlight on the side of a building and lit up a huge text message: “I’m voting because…." It sparked peer-to-peer conversation and gave street teams a chance to hand out printed materials. Data wer also captured from the text messages entered electronically.


Kopp describes a balance between voter-to-voter peer messages and top-down campaign-to-voter messages. He says that the peer-to-peer messages built trust and were never interrupted with brand messages from the campaign: "The campaign knew the difference between conversations among voters, which had to be respected, and the campaign-to-voter conversation, which had to be controlled and directed from the top. The campaign earned voters’ trust by respecting peer-to-peer conversation and making sure not to interrupt it or interject the Obama brand inappropriately.... We gave people the tools, info and opportunities. They mobilised. We earned their trust. Meanwhile, we learned to live with contradictions: tight control from the top vs. an “open source” approach from the bottom."


Kopp describes the value of both an official and a social network website: "The Web site offered useful, up-to-the-minute, top-down content, such as speeches, position papers, news releases, volunteer opportunities and training videos in text, audio and video. MyBo was a social networking, community organising engine that communicated ideas and connected people peer-to-peer, based on their interests and locations. MyBo also facilitated action, both online and off. It made it fun and easy for supporters to take real-world actions to help the candidate - making phone calls, housing fundraisers or donating money." The campaign used text messaging, which increased in use when the vice presidential nominee was announced by text messaging. The short code for accessing messages was an alpha-numeric spelling of the presidential candidate's name.


In conclusion, Kopp states that digital technology is simply an enabler and should never be the only communication tool used, but rather part of a consistent online and offline group of thoughtful communication strategies. However, it can influence the conversation with sharp insights about the audience and be useful with a core of consistent messages that can be crafted into a compelling story.

MAZI website on March 3 2009.