An article in the June 2008
Atlantic Monthly by Joshua Green describes Barack Obama’s
Amazing Money Machine. We have selected only the parts that reflect Web and Enterprise 2.0 as contrast to the 1.0 approach of Hillary Clinton and John McCain.
In 2004, Mark Gorenberg, a key player in this story, started applying Silicon Valley’s networking strategies and, “By the end of the 2004 campaign, Gorenberg had surpassed all the old names to become Kerry’s biggest fund-raiser. Gorenberg teamed up with a friend, Nadine North, ... to pursue a new goal in 2006: helping Democrats win back the House of Representatives ... By November, Gorenberg and North were among the top Democratic fund-raisers nationwide.
“Barack Obama was new to most Americans when he entered the presidential race, in February 2007. … What ultimately transformed the presidential race—what swept Obama past his rivals to dizzying new levels of campaign wealth—was not the money that poured in from Silicon Valley but the technology and the ethos. The campaign’s focal point is
My.BarackObama.com, which has made better use of technology than its rivals since the beginning.
"When
My.BarackObama.com launched, at the start of the campaign, its lineage was clear. The site is a social-networking hub centered on the candidate and designed to give users a practically unlimited array of ways to participate in the campaign. You can register to vote or start your own affinity group, with a listserv for your friends. You can download an Obama news widget to stay current, or another one that scrolls Obama’s biography, with pictures, in an endless loop. You can click a “Make Calls” button, receive a list of phone numbers, and spread the good news to voters across the country, right there in your home. You can get text-message updates on your mobile phone and choose from among 12 Obama-themed ring tones, so that each time Mom calls you will hear Barack Obama cry 'Yes we can!' and be reminded that Mom should register to vote, too.
“'We’ve tried to bring two principles to this campaign,' Rospars told me. 'One is lowering the barriers to entry and making it as easy as possible for folks who come to our Web site. The other is
raising the expectation of what it means to be a supporter. It’s not enough to have a bumper sticker. We want you to give five dollars, make some calls, host an event. If you look at the messages we send to people over time, there’s a presumption that they will organize.'
"The true killer app on
My.BarackObama.com is the suite of fund-raising tools. You can, of course, click on a button and make a donation, or you can sign up for the subscription model, as thousands already have, and donate a little every month. You can set up your own page, establish your target number, pound your friends into submission with e-mails to pony up, and watch your personal fund-raising 'thermometer' rise. 'The idea,' Rospars says, 'is to give them the tools and have them go out and do all this on their own.' … The Clinton campaign belatedly sought to mimic Obama’s Internet success, and has raised what in any other context would be considered significant money online—but nothing like Obama’s totals, in dollars or donors. John McCain’s online fund-raising has been abysmal.
“ 'What’s amazing,' says Peter Leyden of the New Politics Institute, 'is that
Hillary built the best campaign that has ever been done in Democratic politics on the old model—she raised more money than anyone before her, she locked down all the party stalwarts, she assembled an all-star team of consultants, and she really mastered this top-down, command-and-control type of outfit. And yet,
she’s getting beaten by this political start-up that is essentially a totally different model of the new politics."The alchemy of social networking and the presidential race has given Obama claim to some of the most fabulous numbers in politics: 750,000 active volunteers, 8,000 affinity groups, and 30,000 events. But the most important number, and the clue to how Obama’s machine has transformed the contours of politics, is the number of people who have contributed to his campaign—particularly the flood of small donors. Much of Clinton’s haul, and McCain’s, too, has come from the sort of people accustomed to being wooed in the living room, and Obama initially relied on them, too. But while his rivals continued to depend on big givers, Obama gained more and more small donors, until they finally eclipsed the big ones altogether. In February, the Obama campaign reported that
94 percent of their donations came in increments of $200 or less, versus 26 percent for Clinton and 13 percent for McCain. Obama’s claim of 1,276,000 donors through March is so large that Clinton doesn’t bother to compete; she stopped regularly providing her own number last year.
“'If the typical Gore event was 20 people in a living room writing six-figure checks,' Gorenberg told me, 'and the Kerry event was 2,000 people in a hotel ballroom writing four-figure checks, this year for Obama we have stadium rallies of 20,000 people who pay absolutely nothing, and then go home and contribute a few dollars online.' Obama himself shrewdly capitalizes on both the turnout and the connectivity of his stadium crowds by routinely asking them to hold up their cell phones and punch in a five-digit number to text their contact information to the campaign—to win their commitment right there on the spot.”
A couple of lessons here:
- The people driving the Web 2.0 approach started early and learned fast. This is their third success and each built on the prior one.
- It is partly the technology but mostly it is a 2.0 relationship -- community, collaboration, conversation -- between the product – political candidate – and the market – voters .
This is not the complete story of the 2008 race to the Whitehouse. Complex undertakings almost never have just one story line. But two dominate players using 0.1 approaches are meeting unpredictable difficulty in dominating a 0.2 player. You cna read the complete article in the June 2008
Atlantic Monthly.
Is there a moral here for your enterprise?
