USING NEW MEDIA EFFECTIVELY:

AN ANALYSIS OF BARACK OBAMAS ELECTION CAMPAIGN

AIMED AT YOUNG AMERICANS

BY
Ekaterina Alexandrova

THESIS
SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS OF PUBLIC COMMUNICATION
IN THE DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA STUDIES
AT FORDHAM UNIVERSITY

NEW YORK
JANUARY, 2010

Table of Contents

Hypthotheses
Introduction
The design of the research
Part 1
1.1

Using community organizing methods for a political campaign

1.2

The most expensive presidential campaign ever

1.3

Youth Engagement in the US, 1972-2004

1.4

1.3.1

Youth Vote: Main Trends

1.3.2

The Context for the Campaign 2008

Youth Engagement in the US in 2008

1.4.1

1.5

Youth for Obama

Lessons From the Howard Dean New Media Campaign

1.5.1

Yes, We Can Because You Have the Power

1.5.2

Political Communication as a Two Way Street

1.5.3

Online Activities as Extension of Grassroots Support

1.5.4
1.6

Building Content on the Web

The Main Trends of New Media Communication in 2007

1.6.1

Communities and Bottom-Up Activities Online

1.6.2

Cell Phones as a Critical Element of Contemporary Communication

Part 2
How Obama Did It: the Main features of his New Media Communication Strategy
2.1 Communication Department vs the Internet Division
2.2 Flooding the Web
2.2.1 Online Advertising
2.2.2 Utilizing Free Platforms
2.2.3 Frequency of Updates
2.2.4 The Role of the Mobile Phones in the Obama Campaign
2.3 Beyond the Obvious
2.4 The Role of User-Generated Content in the 2008 Race
2.5 Developing Character
2.5.1 Being positive

2.5.2 Personal Style of Communication

Conclusions
Hypothesis
Lessons From the Obama Campaign
The meaning of the Campaign

Using New Media Effectively:

An Analysis of Barack Obamas Election Campaign
Aimed at Young Americans

On November 4, 2008, more than 12 million young Americans elected the person
who made them believe in their abilities to bring about change, the person who gave them
hope, and the person who let them feel united. It was Barack Obama who won the election,
and it was young people who were pivotal in helping him win. This paper explores the
communication strategy that allowed Barack Obama to engage youth so effectively; it also
reveals successful tactics of using new media for reaching the Millenial generation.
Hypthotheses
The first hypothesis of this research: It was Obamas new media communication
strategy that was the main reason young people, when they voted, preferred his promise for
change to his party affiliation and favored his character over his experience.
The second hypothesis: That this strategy contributed to the election results only as
a part of a complex organizing mechanism, which the whole campaign represented. This
mechanism was made up to promote Obama through building communities, enabling and
promoting bottom-up activities. By the time the campaign started, these ideas were booming
online: social networks and user-generated sites (such as YouTube and Wikipedia) were

the main trends of the contemporary new media communication. Hence the strategy that
married new media tools with Obamas purposes worked especially effectively.
The third hypothesis: That the new media strategies of Obamas main opponents,
Hillary Clinton and John McCain, were ineffective, and failed to harness the power of
communities and user activities. This left Obama as the only one who fought for the young
electorate, and helped secure his victory among Millenials.
Introduction
The way Obamas team used new media for embracing young voters resulted in
fundamental changes in the American political landscape. Obama used the Internet to
develop personal relationships with supporters, and was elected for reasons beyond such
traditional things as experience or party affiliation. In the spring of 2008, researchers
from the Harvard Institute of Politics asked for the main reason young people supported
their candidates. There were no options from which people could pick, so they had to
articulate the reasons themselves. The majority of those who supported Barack Obama,
literally named need for change, reproducing his campaign slogan Change We Need.
Then there were people who voted for his character, those who agree with his policy,
and also those who heard his call for hope and unity. Those who supported other
candidates voted either for their experience, for a political party, policies in general,
or even because they were the best candidate. The results of the poll reflect the power of
Obamas communication strategy: his supporters were armed with concrete messages from
his campaign (change, hope, and unity), which means his message was disseminated

well. The fact that respondents named character over experience suggests he became
an individual for them, not just a distant politician. His new media communication strategy
is responsible for these effects.
Several things about Obama's election campaign as a whole should be understood
before approaching the actual research. It wasn't, as some claim, the Internet that brought
him the presidency, nor was it his charisma, nor was it the money. It was a complex
mechanism consisting of components that could only work all together: a message,
methods, an instrument, tools, and a man at the wheel. Change was the message of the
campaign, which arrived as the country had been in the war for years and was facing a
recession. The Campaigns method was organizing, something that has been driving this
country for ages (Dreier, 2009). The instrument was money: this campaign became the
most expensive presidential campaign in US history. The tool was the media, which mean
a great deal in the informational age. And the man at the wheel was Obama, who himself
was already a symbol of change, who had years of organizing experience, and who hired a
team that raised money using media, and got the most out of the media by spending money
on it. To put it differently, indeed Obama couldnt have won without the Internet, because
he simply wouldnt have be able to raise that much money without it. But there is no
guarantee that he would have won without his timely message or without employing the
organizational strategy he chose in his campaign. (As Time magazine puts it even
fundraising became an organizing tool (Tumulty, 06/05/2008)). Brent Leary, founder of a
company that specializes in community relationship management (CRM), emphasized the

importance of new media for the Obama campaign in his Obama2.0 blog: His campaign's
embrace of technology has played a key role in spreading his message (Leary, 2009).
Provided so much money and effort was invested in the development of this new media
communication strategy, some lessons can be learned from it.
Obamas main competitors, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, let him communicate
with youth through the new media freely. Firstly, they werent as interested in the young
audience as Obama was, which was part of the reason they werent as aggressive as
Obama in using new media. Secondly, their fundraising efforts didnt let them to earn
enough money to invest into developing effective new media strategies. According to
Democratic pollster Paul Maslin, the preferred audiences for the candidates were different
from the beginning. Clearly Hillary Clinton has built impressive margins over and over
this season among seniors, and I suspect that part of her appeal to older voters stems from a
similar backlash at the younger alternative. The more messianic the whole Obama thing
seems, the more his brand becomes associated with kids, and perhaps the more aged wine
there is for McCain & Co. to sip (Maslin, 2008). In other words, Obamas performance
resulted both because he played the game well and because his opponents let him play.

The design of the research

This research is divided into three parts.
The first part provides background information about the general concepts behind

the Obama campaign and its cost, the history of the youth engagement in the US, the
political and media context in which the 2008 campaign was taking place, as well as the
results of the Obama teams efforts. It also explains why Obamas new media
communication strategy aimed at young Americans was more effective than his
competitors strategies. The second part of this research discusses the main features of the
Obama campaign in details and provides specific examples the successful use of various
new media tools. The third part offers conclusions.

PART 1
1.1 Using community organizing methods for a political campaign
The underlying idea of Obamas campaign strategy was community organizing. It
was Obamas initiative to build his campaign from the bottom-up and to apply his
community organizing experience for politics (Newsweek 11/05/2008). It resulted, as
Time magazine claimed, with a fundamental change in politics, and brought him the
victory (Tumulty, 06/05/2008). This section discusses why the concept chosen played
such an important role for Obama. It reveals the meaning of the organizing tradition for the
American culture, and argues that the team Obama benefited from adjusting the new media
communication strategy to the idea of community organizing.
The organizing tradition is built in deep in American culture and the part of
Obamas success was in the fact he and his campaign cultivated this idea. As professor at

Occidental College in California Peter Dreier notices, as early as 1830 Alexis de

Tocqueville, the author of Democracy in America discovered that organizing prevailed over
the equally essential principle of individualism. Dreier writes: Local voluntary
organizations brought Americans together to solve problems, provide a sense of
community and public purpose, and tame the hyper-individualism that Tocqueville
considered a threat to democracy (as cited in Dreier, 2009). Dreier also quotes Franklin
D. Roosevelt, who admitted he was only able to push New Deal legislation through
Congress because of the pressure from the protestors. Roosevelt addressed these words to
supporters: You've convinced me. Now go out and make me do it. What Obama said
prominently on his website was a direct reference to Roosevelt: Im asking you to believe.
Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington Im asking you to believe
in yours. By building his campaign bottom-up, Obama awoke organizing tradition in
Americans, rebuilding a progressive movement (from those who supported Bill Clinton
and John Kerry along with the new generation of Millenials) that brought him to power.
Do you have a quote to back this up? Not 100 percent necessary but would be nice
Leaving the exploration of the effectiveness of grassroots organizing efforts and the
Obamas offline campaign strategy to other researchers, this paper concentrates on the
design of new the media communication strategy, which was build upon on the idea of
community and both promoted it and was enriched by it.
Focusing on community organizing, Obama was communicating directly with
potential voters, implying the idea of unity, while the Clinton and McCain messages and

implications were disconnecting, and detached the candidates from the electorate. The
refrain of all the Obama speeches was The campaign is about you. His message was
telling people that it was them who had the real power to bring around changes they
needed.
Clintons and McCains campaigns in terms of positioning candidates were the
opposite. Clintons campaign was all about her. When she announced her candidacy, she
stated: Im in and Im in to win as opposed to other candidates, who usually spoke in
terms of we us and our (Bogatin, 2007). The focus of her campaign was clear even
from her websites names: HillarySpeaksforMe, HillaryIs44 (note the contrast with
MyBarackObama.com). John McCains campaign in turn focused not even that much on
him, but rather on his opponents, whom he was constantly attacking. As Democrat
strategist Mark Siegel said, "He [McCain] himself is reinforcing that this campaign is all
about Obama. His ads and his message are all negatives. The problem with that is, it is
driving his own negatives up as well" (as cited in Zito, 2008). The press too was pointing
out the absence of a message from his side (see Zito, 2008 and Silvester, 2008). That is to
say that during the race, potential voters were receiving three types of messages: one from
Obama asking them to do something; one from Clinton with the promise she will do
something, and then one from McCain who promised that others, if elected, wouldnt do
anything.
Developing the idea of community, Obama was consistent. He not only declared
the power of the voters, he offered it to them through the new media tools employed in the

campaign. And that is when his communication strategy became critically important. As
one Time reporter explained, it was a unique way to organize the campaign:
The Obama campaign made technology its running mate from the start. That
wasn't just for fund raising: in state after state, the campaign turned over its voter
lists normally a closely guarded crown jewel to volunteers, who used their
own laptops and the unlimited night and weekend minutes of their cell-phone plans
to contact every name and populate a political organization from the ground
up (Tumulty, 06/05/2008).
The way the communication policy was designed enabled people to use their power acting
by themselves volunteering, creating online videos, blogging. Campaign strategists
made sure people felt they belonged to and were supported by the Obama camp, so the
campaign itself became a big community.
1.2 The most expensive presidential campaign ever
By employing community organizing tactics in the campaign, Team Obama
mastered using new media and technology for spreading his message and for raising
money. This helped them to outdo Clinton in the early stage of the campaign and McCain
in the late stage.
During the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama raised and spent more money than
any other candidate in the US history. According to data from the Center for Responsive
Politicss (CRP) site OpenSecrets.org, in 2004 Bush and Kerry spent around $300 million
each on campaigning. In 2008, McCain spent almost $400 million and Obamas spending
was almost twice that, close to $800 million. As Table 1 shows, Obama put more than half
of his budget towards media-related expenses ($427 million) whereas McCain spent only

30% of his budget on media ($130 million). No exact data is available for Clinton.
Table 1
Overall expenses, Campaign 2008
Expenses
Administrative
Campaign
Contributions
Fundraising
Media
Other
Total

Obama, $

McCain, $

174,869,970
72,936,554
45,931,691
30,139,329
427,569,645
8,733,255
760,180,444

100,925,578
35,324,028
29,000,185
17,140,947
129,399,524
75,087,150
386,877,412

Source: Center for Responsive Politics

The connection between the cost of the two campaigns and their results is obvious:
Obama raised more, spent more and benefited more, winning the election. The same can be
said about media expenses (see Table 2). Again, Obama spent more money and got a more
advanced communication strategy.
Table 2
Media Expenses, Campaign 2008
Candidate

Broadca Misc
st

Internet

Consulta
nts

Print

Total

Obama, $

244,600,
266
63,492,7
53

26,555,4
79
4,654,18
3

2,739,204

20,462,67
2
7,460

427,569,6
45
129,399,5
24

McCain, $

133,212,
024
60,517,9
74

727,154

Source: Center for Responsive Politics

As seen from the data, Obama invested almost three times more money in media

than McCain did. For broadcast media, Obamas spending is about four times larger that
McCains, and for the Internet there is a 5:1 ratio. Its also important that Obama spent
four times more than McCain on media consultants, from which we can conclude that his
media strategy was far more advanced on the conceptual level than McCains. This
assertion will be explored later on in this paper.
Of course, dealing with such an expensive campaign, we cannot claim that it only
was new media that gave Obama the presidency, but it was new media that allowed him to
earn money that big, and it was new media that helped him to communicate with young
voters in particular.
1.3 Youth Engagement in the US, 1972-2004

This section provides background information about the history of youth engagement
in the US. It is important to understand both the risk that Team Obama took relying on the
youth vote and the reasons why this was a risk worth taking.

1.3.1 Youth Vote: Main Trends

From 1972 until 2000, youth turnout rates were decreasing every year, with the
exception of 1992. As seen from Table 3, after the peak (55.4%) in 1972 (when 18-20
year olds were first given a right to vote), it decreased by more than 6% at once and then
stayed relatively steady until 1988, when it again dropped more than 6%. The election of
1992 was marked with the rise in turnout and 1996 showed the most significant drop the

history: more than 12%. The turnout level changed for less than 1% next year and jumped
up 8.7% in 2004.
Table 3
Youth Turnout Rates, Presidential Elections, 1972-2008
Presidential

Citizens 18-24

Citizens 18-29

1972

52.1%

55.4%

1976

44.4%

48.8%

1980

43.4%

48.2%

1984

44.3%

49.1%

1988

39.9%

43.8%

1992

48.6%

52.0%

1996

35.6%

39.6%

2000

36.1%

40.3%

2004

46.7%

49.0%

2008

48.5%

51.1%

Election Year

Source: CIRCLE.org
The data provided in the Table 3 shows that until 2000, the youth vote had been
remaining unsteady with the tendency to decrease. The Obama campaign understood and
incorporated lessons from those trends to make its youth communication strategy better.
Youth voting behavior patterns traditionally depend on what is going on in the
country and if there is a candidate who is trying to reach adolescents. In 1972, the main
factor was the war in Vietnam. There were young people protesting against the war in
Vietnam and the Democratic Party nominee Senator George McGovern was running an
anti-war campaign against the Republican Richard Nixon. Considering the response on the

campaign from young people, 18 to 29 year-olds were expected to flood the electorate and
bring the Democrats to power, but it never happened.
In retrospect, 1972 had the highest youth turnout ever, though back then, numbers
were actually considered disappointing. Those who showed up for the election voted
liberally, yet the turnout level did not come up to expectations, so Nixon won the
presidency (Connery, 2008). From 1972 and until the 1980s, the generation of Baby
Boomers (those born in 1946-1964), while voting Democratic, were losing their interest in
the elections and showing a steady decline in turnout numbers.
In the 1980s, after efforts by the right wing, youth started to vote more
conservatively. Generation X (those born in 1964-1974) replaced Baby Boomers and
although it didnt affect the turnout picture, attitudes started to swing towards the right
(Connery 2008). Same thing here with this citation The change reflected the efforts of
Republican Party. Conservatives began working systematically on engagement over the
generation. According to Connery, Republicans started to organize various events for
students, promoting the party and its values. For example, together with the Young
Americas Foundation they built the National Journalism Center, which helped to train and
find job placement for new conservative journalists. To date, more than 900 alumni have
moved to professional careers in the media and now work for USA Today, the Wall Street
Journal, ABC, CBS, and other media outlets.
Change came again in 1992, after Bill Clintons progressive campaign turned to the
new generation. The campaign had a youth spirit: rock stars were out calling for people to
vote and to vote specifically for Clinton; the candidate appeared on various youth media

including MTV (Syro, 1992). Hans Reimer, director of the youth political organization
Rock the Vote, said the sharp issues worked out well with an effort made by the
candidate: There was a candidate who reached out to young people; there was tremendous
interest in voting. It was also the first year of the MTV/Rock The Vote effort. Voting was
part of the social movement. Not only did young people vote Democratic again, they voted
in larger numbers (the turnout rate jumped by 9%).

But after seizing the attention of

Generation X once, the Democrats lost it all after the four years.

The next election

campaign ignored youth as strategic resource and youth responded with a 10% decline in
turnout numbers and a lack of support for the Democrat (Connery, 2008). Same thing here
with citation
Things began to change again in 2002-2003, when some individuals started to use
the Internet for engaging young people with liberal values. The Democratic Party itself
wasnt investing money and effort into embracing young people (the initiative was coming
from the bottom. The dot.org Internet boom manifested itself with an explosion of
organizations founded by and for young people (Connery 2008). Same thing here with cite
The first were the Bay Area Democrats, New Voters Project, Music for America, and
Drinking Liberally. These institutions tried to engage youth with progressive values using
the Internet as an organizing tool. In 2003 alone, conservative organizations got $49
million from the Republican pParty while comparable progressive institutions got only $11
million from the Democrats (Syro, 1992).
The new era began in 2004, when the youth turnout picture changed again
dramatically. Experts claim progressive efforts followed by the innovative Howard Dean

online campaign led to an increase in youth turnout numbers in 2004 (Barr, 2007). Census
data in Table 4 above show that turnout amongst 18-29 year olds increased 9 points to 49%
and turnout amongst 18-24 increased 11 points to 47%. The reasons though werent
coming from the outside efforts only, but rather, this new group of young people seems to
have a slightly different value system then the young people who came before them. This
group, the Millenials, came to replace the Generation X. The 2004 election was the first
time thatwhen the Millenials dominated in the 18-29 year old group and the 18-24 year old
group was completely composed of them. Election results revealed the Millenials were
both immersed in digital media and showing signs of renewed interest in public
life (Xenos and Bennet, 2007). According to the University of Michigans National
Election Study, this generation was more politically active than the previous one: the 18-29
demographic group in 2004 was either higher or matched previous highs on a wide range
of political involvement indicators, when compared to the same age group in previous
elections. Younger citizens showed a marked increase in reading news of the election,
talking about it with others, and thinking about the election and how the outcome might
affect them (Andolina, Jenkins, 2004). Dont end a section on a quotecome back in with
another sentence to conclude with your own idea

1.3.2 The Context for the Campaign 2008

By the beginning of the 2008 campaign, it was clear that the Millenials showed the

potential to impact politics in the future. Although they didnt affect the overall results in
2004, they confirmed the pattern in the midterm election of 2006, when they were more
involved in the election campaign, used the Internet more extensively for political purposes,
and again voted in higher numbers and more Democratic (Teixeira, 2008). Given the fact
in 2008 Millenials would represent 18% of voters and outweigh seniors as a voting group
(16%), it could have been reasonable to treat them as an influential and crucial electorate.

1.4 Youth Engagement in the US in 2008

This section argues that in 2008, youth significantly impacted the result of the
election and helped candidate Obama win the presidency. It also discusses how the new
media strategy developed by the team Obama emerged from the necessity to reach out to
young people and turn them into strong supporters. It will also show that candidates
Clinton and McCain, who werent counting on youth, failed to take new media seriously
enough.

1.4.1 Youth for Obama

Running a youth-oriented campaign, Senator Obama faced the risk that the turnout
level wouldnt match the level of inspiration, as it happened in 1972 and 2004.
Conventional wisdom has a name for candidates who rely on the youth vote: loser, said
to the Times reporter Michael McDonald, an expert on voter turnout at George Mason
University pointing out that Obamas case was different (as cited in Von Drehle, 2008).
Obamas team couldnt help but develop the communication strategy that was keeping

young supporters interested and, at the end of the day, drove them to the vote. And so they
did. Volunteering in record numbers, young people became the super force of the Obama
camp, sustaining and energizing what became one of the biggest grassroots movements for
a presidential campaign ever seen, pronounced The Nation after the elections (Rigza
2008). Again, try not to end paragraph on a quote, but add your own last line, giving a
concluding thought for that paragraph.
Time magazine called 2008 The Year of The Youth Vote (Von Drehle 2008). The
age group 18-29 became a critical mass that first gave Barack Obama the nomination, then
significantly impacted the presidential election results.

Firstly, Millenials turned out in

larger numbers in primaries that helped Senator Obama to overcome Senator Clinton state
by state. For example, in Iowa, youth tripled their turnout level (13% of eligible citizens in
2008 vs 4% in 2004) and supported Obama by the largest margin of any age group. They
voted 57% strong for him and secured his victory.

John Della Volpe, the director of

polling for the Harvard University Institute of Politics, explained that the new generations
choice was crucial for the primaries. The youth vote turned states that Obama wouldve
lost or barely won into more comfortable margins. Not only are they voting in higher
numbers, theyre voting more Democratic, he said (Dahl 2008). So Obamas benefits
from the youth vote are clear.
In the general election, 51.1% of 18-29 year olds voted (turnout rate increased by
3% as opposed to a 1% overall turnout rate increase) and they voted Democratic by
66-32% margin (Tiexiera, 2008). Ruy Tiexiera, a political scientist and a Senior Fellow at

the Century Foundation, confirms that the youth vote made a difference for Obama.
Without 18-29 year olds, Obamas popular vote margin would have been slightly under
one percentage point. That figure implies that the overwhelmingly proportion of Obamas
popular vote victory (87 percent) was attributable to the support of 18-29 year old
Millennials.

Indeed, without these Millennial voters, Obama would have been hard-

pressed to claim much of a mandate from his election victory, Tiexiera wrote. That last
quote should be single spaced, and you need a concluding idea for paragraph after it
The new media communication strategy that helped Obama to embrace young
voters was prompted by the youth themselves, who organized a Facebook group Students
for Barack Obama in 2006, even before he announced his candidacy. By the time he
started his primaries campaign, there were already 250,000 members in that Facebook
group without any effort from the side of the campaign. As a survey conducted by the
author of this research suggests Obama became popular among young people after his
convention speech in 2004 (some young people saw him speaking, but most of the heard
about the speech from friends, chatting in person or through the Internet). This speech is
even mentioned in a famous user-generated video YouTube video I got a crush on
Obama. In early 2007, The Nation pointed out the potential of the new media for Obama:
it wrote that it was young people who were developing activity around the candidate on the
Web, not the candidate trying to get them involved. Joe Trippi, the manager of Dean's
campaign in 2004, confirmed the reporters guesses. The Obama campaign had nothing to
do with it, and they're already at 250,000 people. That's amazing--the Dean campaign, it
took us six months to get to 139,000 people he wrote (Graham-Felsen, 2007). So even

the idea of the bottom-up campaign did partially came from the bottom.

1.5 Lessons From the Howard Dean New Media Campaign

This section provides background on the role played by new media tools in the
Howard Dean primary campaign in 2004, and reveals which lessons Team Obama learned
from that aspect of Deans campaign.
There are two reasons why Deans experience should be described in details in this
research. First, expecting to become dead last in fundraising, Dean managed to raise
more money online than anyone had ever done before (Steeter, 2007). Second, with the
help of technology, he reached out to youth (Jaeger and Herald, 2008). Adolescents
considered him a candidate who was speaking to the concerns of youth in a way that the
rest of the candidates were not (Connery 2007). And although he wasnt able to mobilize
them offline as successfully as online, the young electorate responded to elements of the
campaign. These two things signaled a critical moment in the development of online
political infrastructure for American youth which was seen by Team Obama and
overlooked by his main opponents (Xenos and Bennet, 2007).
Although Dean never won the Democratic nomination, it is acknowledged that his
new media campaign became groundbreaking in many senses, it became the first
networked campaign while other candidates were still using traditional war room
systems (Xenos and Bennet, 2007). This was possible because Deans team saw the
possibilities provided by new media and took advantage of them. The following sections

explore the main features of the Dean campaign that helped to engage youth.

1.5.1 Yes, We Can Because You Have the Power

The Dean campaign slogan You Have the Power manifested changes he brought
into politics. The campaign in general and slogan in particular were concentrated on the
people, not the candidate's merits (Teachout and Steerman, 2008). In a trend repeated by
Obama, Dean invited supporters to engage in a dialogue, offered initiatives, and provided
them with the information needed to actually contribute to the campaign with money, deeds
and ideas. Yes, online enthusiasm did not evolve into offline success, and Dean never won
the Democratic nomination. Yet his experience showed the potential of both technology
and of the young generation. All the candidates in 2008 should have probably taken this
experience into consideration, but it seems that only Obama did so. Zephyr Teachout,
Deans online director, claims that Obama staffers were not pioneers as the press
mistakenly calls them, but professionals who did a great job using lessons theyd learned
from the past. It's not an innovative campaign, but it's an extraordinarily professional one,
she said to Salon magazine. They've taken all our stupid ideas and made them
smart (Madden 2008).

1.5.2 Political Communication as a Two Way Street

Howard Dean was the first to validate the power of online communities for
politics in new media era. As Dean pointed out, he himself learned that nowadays politics
have to respond to popular demand and move away from traditional concepts. You have to
build community, not just enable fundraising. You need to listen, be willing to lead and
willing to be decentralized, he said (Teachout and Steerman, 2008). As his campaign was
going on, Deans team was turning the one-way political communication path into a twoway street, benefiting on various levels from citizens' desire to act. A lot of ideas for the
Dean campaign were coming from the bottom, and what was innovative about it is that his
team actually utilized them.
One notable example of the Dean team collaborating with individuals is the
founding of Music for America, a political organization that promotes progressive values.
Although this institution didnt help Dean win, it ended up serving Kerry well in 2004.
Michael Connery, a co-founder of Music For America, shared the story of the movement
in his book Youth to Power: How Todays Young Voters Are Building Tomorrows
Progressive Majority. At the time, he was a college graduate, who found Deans messages
appealing and wanted to help him reach young peers. Connery and his friends realized that
the Internet and live music could help. So they joined the online community, commented on
Deans blog and started to participate in Deans meet-ups, turning them into small concerts.
After a while, Deans representative contacted them. They met the candidate and became an

independent national organization with a decent budget.

Deans campaign, which was listening to the ideas coming from supporters,
evolved into a campaign that was being run by supporters and driven by communities.
Another example: Meetup.com, then a newborn site built as a tool to help regular citizens to
plan local gatherings of their communities. Again, an individual supporter started to use the
platform for organizing Dean meet-ups. Once the campaign manager Joe Trippi convinced
Dean to appear on one of the Meet-ups, they became the trademark of the campaign.
Similarly, Obama's campaign was engineered as a bottom-up campaign and so was
his communication strategy (Tumulty, 06/05/2008). Dean was the first to tell people: You
have the Power. Obama adapted Deans strategy by addressing the nation with the words
Yes, We Can. By comparison, both Clinton's and McCain's communication strategies
followed top-down schemes (Lopez-Ayala, 2008; Feltz, 2008).

1.5.3 Online Activities as Extension of Grassroots Support

Another innovation by the Dean campaign was that it provided supporters with
opportunities to act not only offline, but online as well. New media tools made it possible
for the members of the Dean campaign network to improve their own platform and
communicate directly with any other member of the network about anything, without
getting permission from the campaign (Teachout and Streeter, 2008). Users were able to
plan events, participate in discussions and donate money.

The Internet first revealed its potential for raising money back in 2000, but it
became used systematically only years later. In 2000, after his victory in the New
Hampshire primary, McCain raised $1 million through his site within 48 hours, and
doubled this sum in a week (Vargas, 2008). There could have been more money, Business
Week suggests, but his site McCain2000.com was unable to handle the flood of those
wanting to donate with their credit cards (Woellert, St. Pierre, 2000). Two years later, a
new way to raise money through email was discovered. In 2001, the liberal website
Moveon.org started to send out emails accompanied with links, which encouraged people
to actually do something, (sign a petition, take part in a survey, send a letter to a politician).
This was a big change from earlier links, which would only provide a reader with more
information. It was 2002 when the first link asked people to donate money to support a
few candidates who were coming out against the War in Iraq. In three days, the appeal
raised $1,250,000 from more than 30,000 individual donors. This experience not only
showed that money could be raised effectively online, but also revealed that the online
population would not respond to every response for funding. In 2004, none of the
politicians except for Dean bothered to look at both McCains and MoveOns experience,
so he only incorporated the MoveOn tool in his campaign and tried to raise money online
(Teachout and Streeter, 2008). In addition, he was the only candidate to object to the war in
Iraq.
In 2008, all the candidates were trying to use the Web for raising money and
engaging people, but only Team Obama brought it onto a new level by launching
MyBarackObama.com. The Dean campaign understood how to use the Internet for the

fund-raising, but not for the organizing, says Marshall Ganz, a public policy lecturer at
Harvard who designed the field organizer and volunteer training system used by the Obama
campaign (as cited in Lai Stirland, 2008). MyBarackObama.com was constructed
specifically for fundraising and organizing, providing volunteers with advanced tools for
doing their work (Melber, 2008). The McCain and Clinton projects were not that
successful in developing their own online communities (Lai Stirland, 2008).

1.5.4 Building Content on the Web

Dean's campaign pioneered building content about the candidate on the Web.
Dean's official Blog for America became the first presidential campaign weblog, providing
supporters with the latest information and was allowing them to launch online discussions.
This blog is another example of bottom-up initiative that played a crucial role in
the development of online political communication (Kerbel and Bloom, 2005). Again,
your footnote number changed to a number again Dean started to gain popularity after he
first announced his disapproving position on the war in Iraq. Traditional media started to
mention his name more often, but at the same time, the information they were providing
people with wasn't complete. The candidate's site didn't seem to be a proper source of
information either (Kerbel and Bloom, 2005). As his supporters recall, those who wanted
to learn more about him and his program had to attend his meet-ups to get familiar with his
messages, but it was obviously not enough (Armstrong, 2007). Consequently, one of his

followers started to collect and spread information about him on the web. He first launched
an independent email listserv and then got an invitation to start contributing to the MyDD
independent blog. Some time later, this man made an attempt to reach Dean, and he made
his way all the way to Deans office and was hired to manage Blog for America. The blog
became one of the most popular weblogs on the Internet with up to 100,000 hits per day
(Armstrong, 2007).
As will be shown in the following sections, Obama learned from this aspect of
Deans campaign, and was far more advanced than other candidates in building web
content.

1.6 The Main Trends of New Media Communication in 2007

This section discusses the communication tools and patterns formed in the
period from 2004 until the beginning of the election campaign in 2008. It argues that the
key idea of the Obama camp building the campaign bottom-up through organizing people
and enabling supporters activities corresponded to the contemporary means and main
trends of the online world. The most visited sites at the beginning of 2007 were MySpace,
Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, MSN, eBay, Live Search, Facebook and YouTube (Prescott,
2007). MySpace and Facebook are social networks, YouTube is a content-sharing site and
Google, Yahoo and Live Search are search engines.

1.6.1 Communities and Bottom-Up Activities Online

A fundamental change happened in the online world after the election campaign of
2004: the boom of online communities (social networks and content-sharing sites) began.
It was 2005 when interest in the online Adult Entertainment sector fell, which had been the
number one place to go online since the Internet started, and it was 2007 when such social
networking sites as Facebook and MySpace became the platforms where users (especially
young people) were spending most of their time (Tancer, 2007). Simultaneously, such
user-driven sites as YouTube and Wikipedia started to boom. The rise of YouTube was
particularly dramatic. In the beginning of February 2007, Hitwise reported that for the first
time in history, YouTube gathered more Internet visits than all of the television network
websites combined (Prescott, 2007). Entertainment seekers are now more likely to go to
YouTube than any other television network or gaming website, Hitwise said. But not only
were people watching YouTube, they were filling it with their own video content. For
example, in the middle of 2007 users were uploading 6 hours of video per minute, then 8
hours, then 10 hours per minute (Junee, 2009).
The popularity of those sites suggests that the online world was witnessing the
rebirth of the American organizing tradition (Haburchak, 2009). So when Obamas staffers
went online, willing to develop his campaign through the same organizing methods, it
turned into an effective scheme. The tools were there, and they built it, said Joe Trippi,
who ran Howard Dean's 2004 campaign. In a lot of ways, the Dean campaign was like the
Wright brothers. Four years later, we're watching the Apollo project. Another important

point is that all of these sites were overwhelmingly occupied by 18-29 year olds, the people
who were the target audience for Obama.
1.6.2 Cell Phones as a Critical Element of Contemporary Communication
Another important trend in communication by 2007 was changes in cell phone use
among young adults. In 2006, youth organizations started to use text messages for both
issue activism and electoral campaigns. A study conducted in 2007 2006 by the New
Voters Project, showed that text reminders increased voter turnout by approximately five
percent. Because in 1972 and 2004 young people failed to turnout in large numbers,
Democrats expected this tool could be useful for the election of 2008. On the top of that,
according to research conducted by the Pew Internet Project in the spring of 2006, young
people were also more likely than older adults to use their cell phones for accessing the
Internet, playing games and checking emails. The Obama campaign, as will be shown
below, ended up running a wireless campaign, which wasnt limited to text messaging
only.
To summarize, as Obama began his quest for the presidency, he found that young
people had migrated to the internet and to wireless technology for most of their
communication needs. He and his team astutely capitalized on those trends, as I will
demonstrate in the next section of this paper.

PART 2

How Obama Did It: the Main features of his New Media Communication Strategy
This part of the paper covers the key elements of the Obama new media
communication strategy and compares it with his opponents strategies. I will argue that
the reason of his success was in the fact that his team understood the nature of new media
correctly and treated it as something new, which demanded a different approach than
traditional forms of media. I will discuss examples that reveal how his community
organizing strategy helped Obama capitalize upon the power of new media in a new and
ultimately successful way.

2.1 Communication Department vs. the Internet Division

One of the key features of Obamas campaign was the fact that his online operation
was run not by so-called Internet people, but by communication professionals. Whereas
both Clinton and McCain had Internet campaigns and Internet directors, Obama had
new-media/communication director Joe Rospars, who was managing the new media/online
campaign. The difference in definitions matters as it determines different approaches to the
media. Clintons and McCains organizational structure implied that the Internet was just
another medium, an extension of traditional media in a way, while Obamas strategy
implied it was an environment consisting of many different old and new tools. As Obama
himself admitted: What I didn't anticipate was how effectively we could use the Internet to
harness that grassroots base, both on the financial side and the organizing side. That, I

think, was probably one of the biggest surprises of the campaign, just how powerfully our
message merged with the social networking and the power of the Internet, he told The
New York Times Magazine. Even not expecting it to be that effective, Obama was relying
on it from the very beginning. Each member of the Obama online operation team was
responsible for a particular tool, which matched his or her professional background.
People from television were running the video campaign, reporters were doing blogging, a
communications strategist ruled text-messages and external social network profiles, and a
founder of the whole online social networking movement ran social networks. This
approach was the key to Obamas successful courting of young voters on the internet.

2.2 Flooding the Web

It was clear before the campaign even started that the candidates would need to
flood the Internet to have better chances to reach voters. In early 2007, research conducted
by Opinion Research Corporation and iCrossing stated that the 2008 presidential campaign
would be turned into the Internet election and that the next president would become (in
marketing terms) a highly considered purchase for online users (p. 3). Based on their
analysis How America Searches: Election 08, they claimed that success in attracting voters
would depend on a wide presence on the Internet. They found that 47% of Americans had
already started to conduct their research about candidates and issues using the Internet, and
predicted that over time, even more people (especially young people) would be doing so.

The recommendations made by Pew for candidates included a suggestion to

build content around highly-searchable issue-based terms to make sure they would be
visible in both paid and natural search results. This means that one of the goals all the
candidates were supposed to work on was to get into the search results for news, images,
videos and blogs. The following sections describe which results candidates achieved that
in 2008.

2.2.1 Online Advertising

This section shows that by promoting himself and his message online, Obama
was spending much more money on web ads than his competitors Clinton and McCain. It
argues that this decision contributed significantly to his popularity over the other
candidates.
Experts from ClickZ, the largest resource for interactive marketing news, claim
that web ads mattered more than ever in the 2008 race (Kaye, 11/4/2008). Its marketing
specialists analyzed online advertising efforts beginning in January 2007 and concluded
that candidate Obama spent more on online ads than any other candidate and benefited from
it the most. His campaign raked in millions of small payments from online donors, and
we can assume much of that cash came in as a result of search and display ads and e-mails
sent to those joiners, says the analysis.
In terms of online advertising, the Clinton and McCain campaigns were both less

expensive and less sophisticated than Obamas campaign. Hillary Clinton, for example,
distributed her limited funds inefficiently. During 2007 and 2008, she spent more than
$500,000 on online ad-related expenses and put only 57% of the money towards Google
search ad services while Obama only within the first four months of 2008 spent $3 million
on online ads and gave 70% of this money to Google (Kaye, 06/16/2008). This means
Obama outspent Clinton on Google by an almost 10-to-1 ration, $2 million to $290,000.
As ClickZ found out, all the candidates used the Google AdWords service, but the Clinton
campaign started to use this service later than Obama, then cut it off for the last two
quarters of 2007. By the time the Clinton campaign got back to it, the primaries were
almost over. Peter Greenberger, who manages Googles political ad department, suggests
that this affected the results of the primaries. They [the Clinton campaign] had already dug
themselves into a huge hole in terms of how many small donors they could count on. All
along, the Obama campaign had been building this huge list and Clinton wasn't even in the
game, he said (as cited in Kaye, 06/10/2008). That is to say even on a smaller budget,
there were some opportunities on which the Clinton campaign simply missed out, giving
way to the Obama campaign.
As for John McCain, experts from ClickZ concluded although he was big on
search and some strategists even claim he launched the greatest online marketing campaign
ever, his online efforts were less effective than Obamas. While Obama's digital
marketing efforts, including search and display advertising, were viewed as consistent in
message and well-integrated with the offline campaign, McCain's digital efforts were seen

as more separate from the overall strategy, relegated to their own silo explained ClickZ
(Kaye, 11/17/2008). On top of that, as with Clinton, McCains online budget was only a
fraction of what Obama spent. As ClickZ reported, in 2008 McCain put an estimated $1.53
million towards online ads while Obama reported spending $8 million. Obamas more
forceful online ad strategy allowed him to fill the web with his message, which resulted in
his raising more money from small donors than his competitors.

2.2.2 Utilizing Free Platforms

In addition to advertising, all the candidates made an attempt to incorporate free
online platforms into their strategies. This section argues that Team Obama did that more
successfully than their competitors. By utilizing new media very early, Obamas campaign
managed to build an enormous list of supporters long before other candidates even
started building theirs (Kaye, 06/10/2008).
From the very beginning of the campaign, Obama was represented on all the
popular and well-known social networking and content-sharing sites as well as on the lesstrafficked ones. He had accounts on Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Twitter, MeetUp, and
Flickr, but also on specifically-oriented, yet strategically important platforms such as
LinkedIn, Digg, Eventful, BlackPlanet, Eons, AsianAve, MiGente, Faithbase, Glee,
MyBatanga, and DNC Partybuilder.

Scott Goodstein, who was in charge of Obama's

profiles on social networks, pointed out in an interview in The Washington Post that since

people tend to have their favorite sites, the campaign was making an effort to reach voters
where they were. Some people only go to MySpace. It's where they're on all day. Some
only go to LinkedIn. Our goal is to make sure that each supporter online, regardless of
where they are, has a connection with Obama, he said (Vargas, 2008). Goodstein said
although they were making sure that all the necessary information about the candidate
would be presented on each platform (along with the Donate button), the ultimate goal
was to drive users to the campaign site, MyBarackObama.com. This site was a social
network designed by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, which, echoing the iCrossing
research recommendations became a major platform for all users activities.

2.2.2.1 Campaigning for the Democratic Nomination

When Obama announced his candidacy for president in February 2007, he had far
less name recognition than Clinton. So the task was to generate publicity, to introduce the
candidate to the public, to familiarize potential voters with his position on key issues, and to
raise as much money as possible. The team used the Web extensively for those purposes.
Clintons crew, by contrast, relied on her fame, big donors and traditional media (Cohen,
2008).
One of the reasons why candidates chose different strategies has to do with the
demographics of their supporters. Potential Obama voters were represented online better
than those who were potential Clinton supporters.

Her advisers pointed out the

disadvantage from the very beginning and while Obamas staff basically tried to reach

those who already were online, the Clinton campaigns goal was to drive people online.
Our challenge from the start of the campaign has been to bring more of Senator Clintons
supporters to the Web, said Peter Daou, Mrs. Clintons Internet Director, in an interview
with The New York Times (as cited in Luo, 2008). Independent experts were pointing out
the same problems. Obama and Clinton have different audiences, and if Hillary Clinton
were just as smart about using the new media, it wouldnt do her as much good, because
its not her natural audience. Its not as if the new media alone is able to persuade an
audience and bring them in, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the University of
Pennsylvanias Annenberg School for Communication (as cited in Simendinger, 2008). In
March 2008, The New York Times reported that a Facebook group, One Million Strong for
Barack, had more than 500,000 members. A similar group for Mrs. Clinton had fewer than
25,000. In contrast, the Facebook group One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary counted
more than 948,000 members (Luo, 2008). So clearly Obama, who was relying on youth,
had an easier time than Clinton promoting himself online.
Nevertheless, even considering the demographics, Clintons team was losing
unnecessary points to Team Obama. After the primaries were over, experts agreed that
Clintons problem was not only in the fact that her supporters werent represented online as
widely as Obamas, but also, as the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen pointed out,
she was trying to approach new media they way she worked with traditional media. More
than any other factor, it has been Barack Obamas grasp of the central place of Internetdriven social networking that has propelled his campaign for the Democratic nomination
into a seemingly unassailable lead over Hillary Clinton. Her campaign has been so 20th-

century. His has been of the century were in, Cohen wrote (2008). Clinton made some
blunders in her strategy of flooding the web.
One of the peculiarities of Clintons online campaign was the intention to occupy
the web by building her own sites (about 20 in total) rather than developing and promoting
theme groups on the major social networks as Obama was doing (Lopez-Ayala, 2008).
For example, she had about 10 micro-sites, highly targeted sites for each part of her
potential audience. There were stand-alone sites for pro-Hillary news articles, blog posts,
and videos (HillaryHub), fact-checking information (FactHub), youth (YouthHub), moms
(Moms for Hillary) and for women (Women for Hillary). This means not only that her
campaign was spending time and money on building these sites, but they had to spend time
and money on promoting them, while the only site Obama had to promote was his multipurpose social network. Clintons sites, in contrast, did not even necessarily redirect users
to Clintons main site.
Another problem was that Clinton did not seem to understand that various kinds of
new media demanded differing concepts of implementation. Clinton did have accounts on
the major social networks as Obama did, but her presence there was not supported by a
comprehensive strategy that would comprise all facets of online social media. For example,
consider her Twitter account.

First of all, her team started to use it a year later than

Obamas. Secondly, although as Lopez-Ayala points out, there was a comparable number
of tweets, the platform wasnt being used for its intended purpose -- to launch two-way
communication with supporters. As Michael Turk, a former eCampaign Director for Bush-

Cheney 2004 noted commenting Lopez-Ayalas post, Clintons Twitter presence was rather
nominal and not effective. Barack has 25,833 followers, you have 3,353. Barack follows
26,030, you follow 0. Barack listens to more people than he talks to. If you want people to
believe you're having a conversation, then you might want to take a look at that, Turk
wrote.

Although she used a wide range of new media tools for communication with

supporters, Clinton was still trying to apply traditional strategies, so she didnt really flood
the web the way Obama did.

2.2.2.2 Campaigning for President

Similarly with Clinton, McCain was a far better known politician than Obama, and
yet he didnt take full advantage of his fame as he tried to promote himself online. Mcain,
who was first elected to Congress in 1982, was arguably the best known, most
interviewed, and most written about Republican politician (Quily 2008). iCrossing data
shows that McCain initially had very good results for search visibility. Yet Obama, who
became known only after his Democratic Convention speech in 2004, was presented online
much better than McCain by the end of the campaign. An independent Canadian researcher
Peter Quily compared the Internet presence for both Obama and McCain on November 8,
2008 (see the Tables 5 and 6 below). The figures clearly show, as someone put it in the
online discussion, McCain was in a shouting match against a guy with a megaphone..

Table 5
Search Engine Results For Barack Obama & John McCain

On November 8, 2008

Search Engine

Google

Barack
Obama

John McCain

56,200,000

42,800,000

Google News

136,000

371,620

Google Image

24,200,000

8,620,000

Google Video

136,000

89,800

4,633,997

3,094,453

Google Blog
Source: Pete Quily

Looking at these results, we see that Obama was outdoing McCain in every
possible search criteria except for news, where McCain tripled Obamas results. But
again, McCain had 26 years of national political exposure versus only 4 years for Obama.
That is to say that whatever depended on Obamas team in web promotion was done. The
only thing that couldnt be controlled was news, since the engine searched media outlets
where campaign staffers couldnt post their own information.

Table 6
Social Media Website Statistics
November 8, 2008

Barack

John

Obama

McCain

567,000

18,700

Facebook Supporters

2,444,384

627,459

Facebook Wall Posts

495,320

132,802

1,669

125

MySpace

859,000

319,000

MySpace Friends

844,781

219,463

MySpace Comments

147,630 none listed

Twitter

506,000

44,800

Twitter Followers

115,623

4911

262

25

34,300

27,400

358,000

191,000

1,819

330

117,873

29,202

Youtube Friends

25,226

none listed

Flickr

73,076

15,168

Flickr Photostream

50,218

No Profile

7,148

No Profile

Social Media Website

Facebook

Facebook Notes

Twitter Updates
Friend Feed
Youtube
Youtube Videos Posted
Youtube Subscribers

Flickr Contacts
Source: Pete Quily

The social media presence chart shows that Obama was being far more active than
McCain in updating his profiles. Compare Obamas 1,600 Facebook notes with 125 notes
from McCain, or 262 Twitter updates with 25 from McCain. As brand marketer Oliver
Blanchard interpreted it, the more active Obama was, the more followers he was attracting.
McCains problem repeated the one that Clinton had: he couldnt figure out how to use new
media to make them work effectively. As Blanchard puts it, he didnt move beyond the
obvious, using YouTube as a broadcast channel, and probing the value of Facebook/
MySpace communities. Not understanding the value of these channels most certainly cost
the McCain campaign dearly in the final weeks of leading to the Nov. 4 elections, he
concludes (2008). Obamas team wasnt simply trying to flood the webit was putting on
an effort to activate the power of the tools. Teams Clinton and McCain were simply
spreading information abouut the candidates.

2.2.3 Frequency of Updates

Another thing that should be taken into consideration with new media tools is that
they demand frequent updates Again, Team Obama understood this better than the others.
Scott Goodstein explained in an interview in The Los Angeles Times that the frequency of
updates was something that concerned his team:
I think that a challenge for organizations moving forward is to figure out how
much information supporters want and where they want that information. Do they
want it on their phone? Do they want it from their Facebook account? Do they want
it on e-mail?

Lets say Barack is appearing on a late-night TV show. If you send it by email, by the time people check their e-mail, the show could be over. Different types
of announcements now warrant different types of communications. It may be that
sending out three bulletins a week on MySpace might be all that the folks on
MySpace want. But if youve signed up for the Barack Obama Twitter feed, you
want information from us at least once a day (as cited in Linthicum, 2008).

Looking at Table 6, we can see how the frequent updates worked. Obama had 1,800
videos uploaded on YouTube during the campaign and something new appeared several
times a day, while McCain only had 330 videos, and the channel wasnt being updated
daily. As for Twitter, there weree 260 tweets for Obama vs. 25 for McCain. So Obama
was communicating with voters more often than his competitors.

2.2.4 The Role of the Mobile Phones in the Obama Campaign

In addition to flooding the web and reaching voters through the various online
platforms, the Obama campaign was also the only one to reach potential voters through
their cell phones. It turned out to be an effective channel for contacting young people
during the primaries and general election.

The way Team Obama used text messaging to communicate with young supporters
is a notable example of using the capabilities of this form of communication. Young voters
are more likely than older votes to use their cell phones, and increasingly they dont even
have landline service. About one in three people between the ages of 18 and 29 dont have
a landline (Graff, 2008).

The Obama campaign was running, as The New York Times called it, the biggest
text messaging experiment ever. Todd Zeigler, senior Vice-President for the Bivings
Group, an Internet communication company, suggested that using mobile technologies also
helped Obama to reach out those young adults who werent using the Internet to connect
with the candidate. It [text-messaging] is a great way to reach young voters who are heavy
users of text messaging and in many cases have turned against email. For a lot of young
people text messaging is a primary mode of communication, supplanting regular phone
calls and email He suggests (2008). Another important advantage of text messages is that
people dont normally skip them. Text messaging is really powerful. If I have a text
message, I can forward that text message to over 100 people in my cell phone list, David
All, a Republican strategist specializing in technology, told to Associated Press. It's going
to be read by every single person have you ever not read a text message? (as cited in
Assosiated Press 08/20/2008).
By the end of the election campaign, Team Obama had 10 millions cell phone
numbers in their database, the majority of which, according to Text Messaging Director
Steve Goodstein, belonged to young people. This database, researchers claim, helped
Obama to win the primaries and, along with other factors, was significant help in winning
the election.

But how did he do it? Before Obama, candidates had never done anything other
than sending subscribers reminders to watch a candidates appearance on TV or to vote on
Election Day. For example, Dean ran a text message campaign, but it never really worked

out. So Even Obama staffers were skeptical, explained The Washington Post. Unlike
YouTube, texting is not free; depending on their cell phone plans, supporters have to pay to
receive and send messages. The reason why Obamas experiment was effective is his
team approached this new medium differently.

If in case of the Internet the campaign needed to invade many platforms to reach
more people, in the case of cell phones they needed to build as big a database as possible.
So gathering supporters numbers was the problem to solve. Obamas solution was, as
researchers called it, a juicy piece of information (Stelter, 2008). The notable technique
here was a promise to share the name of Obamas running mate with those who texted
VP to a dedicated number. Another example of the same tactics were commercials
offering campaign stickers to those who texted Barack to the same number.

As with every new media tool that was involved in the campaign, the campaigns
mobile strategy was based on peoples habits. In other words, Obamas crew knew why
and how voters use their cell phones, and they made sure to provide users with all the
possible ways of using them to connect with the candidate. Young people use cell phones
not only for texting and talking, but for playing games, and for accessing the Internet. So
the Obama campaign wasn't limiting itself with phone banking and texting only. There were
Obama ringtones and wallpaper. There was a site called Mobile Obama with the latest news
and videos available for download. There was even an iPhone application Obama08,
which allowed people to share their address books with the campaign and volunteer.
Once the database began to grow, Team Obama started to use it not simply for

communicating with users, but also for mobilizing them for local events. Obamas
campaign was the only who regionalized their base, which was important for organizing
people during rallies and providing them with the local information they needed:
On his computer, Mr. Goodstein can scroll through lists of cell phone numbers
and sort the groups by area code, ZIP code or other demographic information.
Demonstrating that tool, he pointed to a list of hundreds of supporters who said
they lived in Broward County, Fla., and showed how he could send a message to
them about a rally planned for the next day (Stelter, 2008).

Although the possible benefits from adopting marketing mobile strategies for political
purposes were known before (a study made by the New Voters Project proved that text
message reminders on the day of an election helped to improve turnout up to 5%)
candidates McCain and Clinton didnt manage to take advantage of this technology as much
as Obama did. The Clinton campaign started to text its supporters even before Obama, but
it didnt work very effective for her. First of all, her audience consisted mostly of older
people (according to Pew cell phone study, only 37% of those 30-49 years old use text
messaging, for 50-64 year olds this figure is 13%, and for those who are 65+ only 8% use
texts) (Raenie, 2006). And the second thing was, as researchers claimed, that she didnt
invest enough money in developing this technology. Ms. Clintons campaign failed to use
a vanity short code and never got the recognition that Obamas did, thus causing Clinton to
fall short with her text campaign and in the primary election, pointed out Cellforcash.com.
The McCain campaign also failed to use text messages effectively. Having been familiar
with the results of Obamas mobile campaign during the primaries, the McCain campaign
still never started to text. And McCain and his advisors were criticized for that even before

the race was over, saying they were overlooking the potential of text
messaging (Associated Press, 2008). Although, at the moment there is no data that shows
the exact effect of the Obama text messaging campaign, experts comments suggest that this
direct and immediate connection with young voters was something that gave Obama an
advantage over his competitors.

2.3 Beyond the Obvious

Simply using new media and flooding the web wasnt enough to win over young
voters. Reaching young voters through new channels demanded a new approach to these
channels. Team Obama, as opposed to the Clinton and McCain teams, understood that
clearly. Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum, noted that the rise of
Obamas popularity wasnt simply due to the fact that he his audience was represented
online so well, or that he spent a lot of money on ads, or occupied all the free web
platforms. You have to give credit where credit is due: Obama's Internet team is doing a
hell of a job taking advantage of all these changes. They've basically leapfrogged not just
the Clinton and McCain campaigns but also the mainstream media when it comes to
reaching their supporters, he commented to The Washington Post (as cited in Vargas,
08/20/2008). Other experts agreed, saying everything was a matter of putting in effort and
developing a cutting edge strategy. Obama campaign does the best job, said Dee Dee
Myers, who was candidate Bill Clintons spokeswoman in the 1992 race and subsequently
his White House press secretary. The McCain campaign has no clue, and Clinton is

somewhere in the middle (as cited in Vargas, 08/20/2008).

The example of using YouTube shows another kind of innovation brought into
online political communication by Team Obama. Obama's YouTube channel became one
of the most popular YouTube channels and it was something like what a TV network
would look like if broadcasters werent limited with time, money and technical standards.
It outdid both the Clinton and McCain channels along with all the other political channels.
As the head of news and politics at YouTube Steve Grove pointed out, the Obama
campaign set the standard for how to use this tool in the future. The Obama team has
written the playbook on how to use YouTube for political campaigns, he said (as cited in
Vargas, 08/20/2008).
The reason Obamas YouTube channel became so popular is not just the popularity
of the candidate, but the quality of the channel itself. Playing well online is not simply a
function of offline charisma. Unlike playing well on cable or on late-night talk shows, it
takes not only performance skills but also an extensive personal production team, said a
New York Times Magazine article analyzing Obamas video strategy (Heffernan, 2009).
Obamas YouTube channel was a combination of the standards of a professional network
with the benefits of the online television.
Obama's online video campaign was developed and run by professional journalists.
The concept was designed by an Emmy award winner, a CNN political producer with 10
years experience, Kate Albright-Hanna. Not only she was a TV professional, she also
filmed a documentary about Howard Dean that aired on CNN in 2004, entitled True

Believers: Life Inside the Dean Campaign. So she was familiar with Deans online
experiences, which included running his own online channel. A Washington Post reporter,
covering Obamas Online Operation, gave her credit for her work. Forget CNN, Fox
News, NBC et al. Obama stars on his own channel, and it's headed by Kate AlbrightHanna, a self-described YouTube addict who runs Obama's video team (Vargas,
08/20/2008). There were at least nine staffers on Obamas video team working with
Hanna, which the Post called an astounding figure compared with many mainstream news
organizations and past campaigns. (McCain's aides declined to say how many
videographers the campaign has. It has four staffers devoted to Internet activities, and has
also hired an outside vendor, the same article explains).
Like any television network, Obamas YouTube channel was filled with carefully
designed videos of different genres (stories, interviews, music videos, along with more
traditional for political channels speeches and ads) (Heffernan, 2009). The New York
Times Magazine referred to Obamas online content as to a steady diet for
YouTubers (2009). The variety of genres was an important distinction from the Clinton
and McCain channels, which were filled mostly with political ads, gotcha moments and
candidates speeches. The main point was to build interesting content, which users could
share with their friends, explained Albright-Hanna. Here, we don't worry about how many
views our videos get. That's not the priority. One of our goals is to get people talking about
what's going on in their lives and why they're supporting Barack -- and hopefully not only
will they watch the videos but also comment on them and forward them to relatives and
friends and co-workers, she told The Washington Post. And so they were doing Obama

videos which then became viral and traveled through peoples emails.
As on any TV network, Obamas YouTube channel was not concentrating on one
person only but rather on a community of people and their (often local) interests. Kate
Albright-Hanna told The Washington Post that the idea of community was a major part of
the video campaigns concept. Early on, we wanted to capture the sense that this
campaign is not just about Obama, she said. That is exactly what the whole Obama
campaign was about, as Obama himself kept saying, This campaign and this election is not
about Barack Obama, is not about Hillary Clinton, is not about John McCain. Its about
your hopes, your dreams; its about what is possible when a new generation of Americans
stands up to say: Were not gonna settle for what is--were gonna manage what may
be (Obama 05/19/2008). Clintons and McCains channels, by contrast, were fully
concentrated on the candidates personalities and reflected the ideas of their campaigns.
As on any TV network, Obamas YouTube channel was trying to broadcast as
much exclusive content as possible, to attract viewers attention and hold their interest. The
Clinton and McCain channels were mostly filled with ads and excerpts from their TV
speeches. Videos produced exclusively for online broadcasting were the exception rather
than the rule.
Unlike real television networks, a YouTube channel is not limited in time, which
means a video of any length can be uploaded there on any time and run as long as desired,
and Obamas video division seemed to be the only to take full advantage of that. I guess
I've kind of been rebelling from my CNN days, where video had to be a certain length, a

certain format with a certain sensibility, Albright-Hanna told The Washington Post. The
team uploaded over 1,800 videos during the campaign from 15 seconds to 40 minutes long,
which were viewed over 110 million times in total (Vargas, 11/14/2008). That was many
times more than the Clinton and McCain campaigns posted together. McCains campaign
uploaded 300 videos. No exact data is available for Clintons channel. Obamas strategy
was paying off in the new media environment where people conduct their research about
candidates through search engines, noticed The New York Times Magazine (Heffernan,
2009). Whereas a YouTube search for Hillary Clinton or John McCain was turning up
gotcha moments, it turned up positive coverage for Obama. For example the first video
that was popping up in October 2008,John McCain vs John McCain, captured the
moments where he contradicted himself or another one, McCain's YouTube Problem Just
Became a Nightmare. For Hillary Clinton, up came The Shocking video Hillary does not
want you to see or Tensions Flare Between Obama and Clinton at SC Debate. Yet
The New York Times noted that a search for Barack Obama is stacked with videos
approved and uploaded by the campaign or the administration. Users of YouTube may not
recognize this. In the eclectic YouTube interface, all videos the parodies and the
propaganda alike can simply looks like news. So again Obamas team was building
content about the candidate using the opportunities provided by this medium.
Unlike broadcastreal TV networks, YouTube videos dont have to meet any
specific technical standards, neither for the quality of picture nor for the quality of sound.
Obamas staffers again took full advantage of this. Being TV professionals, they didnt

upload raw footage, but they used amateurs cameras extensively, which eased the process
of filming and editing. On the one hand, this allowed them to upload thousands videos. On
the other hand, this also contributed to the idea of community. A lot of the Obama videos
looked very natural for YouTube, since they were made (or looked like they were made)
using the same equipment as regular YouTubers. The campaign also made its own videos
that they looked as if they had been made by amateurs.
A good example of a typical Obamas video is one of his most popular videos
(more than 600.000 views) Our largest rally yet. The video features a rally in Portland
Oregon in May 2008, and includes fragments of Obamas speech as well as brief
interviews with people at the gathering. Several different cameras were used, and most of
the time you see footage from non-professional cameras, which are shaking and even
unbalanced at times. People are interviewed without a microphone. The quality of both the
sound and video wouldnt meet professional TV standards, but as long as a viewer can
hear and see everything clearly enough, it worked for the Internet, adding a shadow of
amateurism natural for YouTube. What is significant is at the same time you can see if you
look closely that a lot of professional manipulation was made before the video was
uploaded. First of all it has a soundtrack. Also, there is nothing undue being said by the
people interviewed. And there are subtitles that help viewers understand what's going on
(where the rally was taking plase, how many people there were). Although it seems that
the lighting is not always good, people who worked on filming and editing seemed to know
exactly what they were doing. If we look for example at the transition at 0'44: as Obama
and his family are leaving backstage to walk on stage, it seems that overlighting is taking

place, which is a video defect. But once light fills the picture, the defect turns into a very
evocative effect. Obamas family is moving towards the light and disappearing in it in order
to appear (in the next cut) in front of a crowd of supporters. So this video, which looks
like an amateur-made piece, but made by the campaign, serves the campaigns goals and
actually meets all the standards of a qualitative documentary story its understandable,
easy to watch, and evocative at the same time. Another example of how the campaign was
taking advantage of the Internets freedom is Obamas Yes, We Can New Hampshire
Speech. Along with the CNN version video (which was viewed more than 3.5 million
times on YouTube), the campaign uploaded its own original version which was
carefully designed. As The New York Times notes, It was cleaner and more elegantly
produced than the CNN version, and it has been played more than 1.5 million
times (Heffernan, 2009). The campaign was taking advantage of its professionalism in an
amateurish environment.
Having said that, members of the Obama video team used their professional skills
to build an online channel that inherited those television traditions that served for the better,
while treating the new medium according to its nature an amateurish-looking,
entertaining, video-sharing platform. As Grove puts it, they used video to cultivate a
sense of community amongst supporters, which was the goal of the whole campaign.

2.4 The Role of User-Generated Content in the 2008 Race

Taking communication as a two-way street, the Obama campaign benefited a lot

from user-generated content. It played upon the idea of community underlying the
campaign and on his message, This campaign is about you. It was reflecting the means
of contemporary new media communication. This section explores the role user-generated
content played in the campaign of 2008.
Candidate Obama provoked people to generate content about him and he used this
content effectively. By encouraging citizens to participate actively in the campaign, by
giving them ideas about how they could contribute and by promoting the content they
created, he overtook candidates Clinton and McCain, who limited themselves with simply
enabling citizens activity.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project predicted that the Presidential
campaign of 2008 would redefine participatory politics, and that to succeed online,
candidates would have to let users drive the campaign by generating the content, just as
they drive the Web 2.0. The aims of incorporating user-generated content into a campaign,
according to the study, would be to allow users to express themselves in the way they were
used to expressing themselves online, to demonstrate that they or their peers were being
listened to, and to benefit from spreading free, non-traditional content which online users
tend to use as a source of political information along with traditional sources (Smith, 2009).
Not all the candidates met those aims. The example of YouTube, one of the most
influential media in the campaign, reveals the candidates strategies regarding usergenerated content.

Researchers from the Pew noted, that campaign 2008 is often described as
America's first YouTube election. As they reported, 43% of online political users
watched online videos from unofficial sources like YouTube. And the numbers were even
higher amongst young people: Pew found that 67% of people 18-29 years old watched
online political videos from either a campaign or a news organization and 54% watched
unofficial often user-generated content (Smith, 2009). Whats more important, the majority
of the most-viewed videos on the Internet were made by individuals (Melber, 11/04/2008).
Candidate Obama from the very beginning of the campaign cycle expressed more
interest than other candidates in encouraging Internet users to post content online.
According to the Pew Research Center, one in five Internet users posted political content
online, and this online political participatory class consisted mostly of young adults
(Smith, 2009) . By aiming at young people, who were the likeliest content generators, he
was also hitting most other Internet users as well--who could run into videos by simply
surfing YouTube or searching the information about candidates through search engines, or
by receiving a link from a friend. In this respect, the more targeted content on about a
candidate there is on the Internet, the more content about the candidate people are likely to
see. As it turned out later, only 1 out of the top 20 most-watched online videos about
Obama actually came from the campaign (Melber, 11/04/2008). The ratio is the same for
McCain, with the only difference that most-watched video about him was made by Obama
supporters.
The Obama team's strategy was to encourage people to generate content, to respond

to it, and to promote it. He explained this position clearly in the YouTube video How Can
We Make This Country Better (Obama, 07/13/2007). Uploaded on June 13th 2007, it
was watched over 800,000 times during the campaign cycle. In the video, Obama states the
problem: We turned away from politics, and gives a straightforward idea how young
people can make a difference and help solve it. He says it is not even necessarily by
volunteering, but by simply sharing their stories, ideas and thoughts in video form with
both campaign staff and the public. He promises the stories would be heard and they
would help to change things. He then invites youth to upload video replies on his
YouTube page. So from the very beginning of the campaign, it was made clear that
Obamas supporters were welcomed and expected to contribute to the informational flow of
the campaign. And that meant a lot to young people. Obama was literally saying that by
doing what they had already been doing regularly for fun, they could now make a
difference for the country. Interestingly, on the exact same day, June 13th 2007, user
barelypolitical uploaded onto YouTube a music video called I Got a Crush on Obama.
This user-generated piece became the first viral video about Obama, and during the
campaign it gathered more that 12 millions views and about 80,000 comments. This
experience revealed the potential of supporters efforts.
The example of the Yes, We Can Obama Song shows how Obama got the most
out of user-generated videos. The musician Will.i.am independently made a music video
Yes, We Can Obama Song and uploaded it onto YouTube on February 2, 2008.

The

black and white video featured a number of celebrities repeating the words of Obamas

speech Yes, we can. And although the campaign had no involvement in the production,
the clip was promoted on the campaign community blog my.barackobama.com along with
the request to share it with friends. The video became viral and was viewed 17 million
times on the Will.i.am YouTube Channel, but it also was uploaded on the official Obama
YouTube Channel under the Favorites category, where it was viewed more than 6 million
more times.
If Clinton and McCain had truly realized that new media functioned differently from
the traditional media, they would invite their potential audience to contribute to YouTube, as
well. But neither of them encouraged users to produce content very actively, and both
seemed to ignore what was becoming popular on the Internet. Both the Clinton and
McCain campaigns acted differently in similar situations. As for Clinton, her campaign
hardly used her YouTube channel and seemed to ignore YouTube as a medium in general,
relying on her sites www.hillaryclinton.com and www.hillaryspeaksforme.com. So she
failed to take advantage of something that was done by individual supporters for her. For
instance, on February 25, 2008, user Lopezdashayala uploaded onto YouTube a musical
slideshow for Clintons Latino campaign song (Lopezdashayala, 2008). The slideshow
became popular enough to be featured on the front page of the site. But, according to the
user, with no additional support it lost its rating. It was immediately flooded with negative
comments from Obama-supporters, who downrated the video, the norm for pro-Hillary
content on YouTube, Lopezdasayala complained and continued, And, yet, paradoxically,
there is a lot of great pro-Hillary content on YouTube which is never showcased (see
comments for Lopez-Ayala, 2008). Another example of Clintons YouTube shortcomings

is an official video from the campaign, the Clinton Sopranos parody, a video that gathered a
lot of attention online, but could have gathered more. The campaign uploaded the video
onto her site only, not on the YouTube channel. Still, it became the second most viewed
video of that day, with over 250,000 views, and with later uploads the video garnered
700,000 additional viewers. Even though the piece was watched over a million times on
YouTube, the user who uploaded it there first says that the Clinton campaign wasnt
interested in promoting this video through YouTube. They wanted to have this moment all
to themselves, so they didn't post it to their YouTube channel, instead roadblocking people
to HillaryClinton.com where there would be no conversation, no comments, and no pesky
video replies. While on the site, they also wanted people to sign up and donate, the user
wrote (Ruffini, 2007). Needs a concluding ideawhat does that say about the hillary
campaign?
Similarly, McCains campaign ignored supporters efforts. An independently made
pro-McCain video called Dear Mr. Obama, which featured an army officer who critiqued
Obamas position on Iraq, was rated by the BBC as the #1 Political Ad of 2008 and
attracted more than 13 million viewers on its original YouTube page. It was also the single
most-viewed video focusing on Obama, yet McCains campaign never took advantage of it
(Melber, 11/04/2008). It neither promoted this video nor distributed it, so it didnt appear
on McCains YouTube Channel, where, as Melber mentioned, it could have attracted
additional attention.
Both Clinton and McCain underestimated the power and possible benefits of online

videos generated by citizens, while Obama made the most out of them. So these efforts
became helpful for his campaign in terms of cultivating a sense of community, supporting
the idea the campaign is about you, making people feel they were being listened to, and
flooding the web with the content about the candidate.

2.5 Developing Character

This section provides important examples of how the communication strategy can
affect the image of a candidate to form his character for the audience.

2.5.1 Being positive

A lot of young people appreciated Obamas character, which in fact meant they
appreciated the positive image formed by his strategists. A paradigmatic example from the
beginning of the campaign was one where Obama staffers called Hillary Clinton DPunjab instead of D-New York in a press release, referring to her long support to India
(Libert and Faulk, 2009). Obama found it inappropriate and had to publicly apologize for
it, claiming that neither he nor his senior staff had approved the passage (CNN-IBN, 2007).
No negativity should have been made in his name, he said. No winks, no nods here, he
warned the team (Libert and Faulk, 2009). That was a position of the campaign. And that
is what the press and experts were noticing. Obama was more positive than his
competitors. And when he attacked, Obamas ads, some of which were also uploaded

online, were based of facts rather than on opinions as McCains were. For example, a
typical Obamas attacking ad would cite McCain speaking on an issue and then contrast it
with him saying different words on the same issue. Or, as in the commercial Seven they
pointed out that McCain forgot how many houses he had and then said he had seven
houses. Obamas supporters were pointing out the same tendency: Obama ads have given
us back McCains words and policies for review. McCains have been far more personal
and simply false. Talk to factcheck folks to see if there is validity in these observations.
One is about policy, the other about personal destruction and making people principally
afraid (Lee, 2008). So the idea was for Obama to try to keep face and not to be critiqued
for negativity as McCain.
Yet on YouTube there were a lot of false and negative ads about Obamas
competitors McCain and Clinton. At first sight, it seems they were coming from Obama
supporters, but there are facts that suggest that was not necessarily so. It is not clear if
astroturfing (a fake political activity, organized from somewhere above, passed off as the
genuine action and concern of real, genuine people (Weeks, 2009)) and not natural user
activity was taking place--and such a possibility should be taken in consideration.
Although the following examples arent aimed to prove whether or not Obamas
campaign was involved in astroturfing, they show that this might have been a part of his
communication strategy. Several investigations made by the web enthusiasts revealed that
some of the videos attacking McCain were produced by people somehow affiliated with the
campaign.

For example, the origins of the Vote Different video, which appeared on

YouTube early in 2007 and gathered more than 5 millions views, are debatable. The video
is a parody on a 1984 Apple commercial, which some people consider to be one of the
most memorable commercials ever. The original version, directed by Ridley Scott, recreates
the atmosphere of George Orwell's 1984 world: a crowd of people is starring at a big
monitor, which features a huge face of an IBM representative hypnotically lecturing an
audience of dull worker drones (Neural Gourmet, 2007).

A female runner throws a

hammer in the screen and breaks it. In the parody, the face of an IBM representative is
replaced with the face of Hillary Clinton. The ad suggests to vote differently and ends up
with the URL of Obama's website. MSNBC together with Associated Press revealed that
the author of the parody is an employee of Blue State Digital, the media company which
advised Obama. And although reporters noted that the campaign denied it had anything to
do with the ad, the dark cloud hung over Obama camp (Mitchel, Johnson and AP, 2007)
Another investigation took place in the fall of 2008. The Java Report, a
conservative news blog which mostly covers terrorism and Islamic traditions, said that the
people who produced the video ad claiming that Sarah Palin was an anti-American radical
weren't simply individuals (the Java Team, 2008).

They found out that the ad-makers

worked for a professional PR company, which cooperated with the Democratic party and
David Axelrod, who was a CEO Blue State Digital and also Obama's chief strategist. One
of the main arguments suggesting the situation was suspicious is the fact the video was
removed shortly after the investigations results were published.

Whether it was

astroturfing or just a citizen's effort, an article from Business Week brought up another
reason to consider that this was more than a simple coincidence. It reported in its article

A Secret Side of David Axelrod from March 2008 that Axelrod, who runs several media
businesses, also owns a company called ASK, which specializes in astroturfing (Wolinsky,
2008). Among its clients are AT&T, the Chicagos Children Museum and ConEd. The
reporter doesnt say that astroturfing had anything to do with the Obama campaign, but he
does link up Axelrod, ConEd and Obama. Axelrod's public and private efforts bump into
each other at ConEd, too. Illinois employees of the utility and its parent, Exelon, have
contributed $181,711 to Obama's Presidential bidmore than workers at any other
company in the state, it says. What it implies is that Axelrod could have used his private
clients power for the campaign, and might have used his private business for the campaign
as well.
The examples above do not provide any evidence that astroturfing should be taken
as a part of communication strategy. But it cant be denied that the actions mentioned
somehow helped to shape public opinion and keep a positive image for Obama while
McCain, who was running attack ads, became associated with negativity.
As mentioned earlier, McCains strategy was to attack Obama. Attacking Obama
didnt play well for his image, but sometimes it did play well for Obamas image. For
example, Obama invoked the US organizing tradition constantly, as Dreier explains:
Nothing in this country worthwhile has ever happened except when somebody
somewhere was willing to hope. That is how workers won the right to organize
against violence and intimidation. Thats how women won the right to vote. Thats
how young people traveled south to march and to sit in and to be beaten, and some
went to jail and some died for freedoms cause.
McCains camp made a mistake here. They were explicitly attacking the idea of community

and by doing so they unintentionally gave Obama a boost. Dreier points the pattern out:
In her acceptance speech for the GOP vice-presidential nomination, Alaska Gov.
Sarah Palin declared, I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community
organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.
The Republicans had hoped that their orchestrated attack on Obama's community
organizing experiencewould discredit the Democratic candidate as being outside
the cultural and political mainstream. But their critical comments triggered a blizzard
of newspaper articles and editorials, radio talk show discussions, e-mails, and
blogosphere commentary. Stories about and columns by community organizers
multiplieddescribing, explaining, defending, and criticizing what organizers do
and the role of community organizing in American life. Actress Laura Linney even
injected the controversy into the Emmy Awards ceremony on September 21
Linney said that the miniseries made her so grateful and thankful for the
community organizers that helped form our country. (Dreier, 2009).
This example drives us to two conclusions: firstly that the McCain communication
strategy overlooked the potential of public discourse, and secondly that such an active
reaction to the critique of community suggests that Obamas fundamental ideas found a
response in Americans.

2.5.2 Personal Style of Communication

As said earlier, part of the online concept embraced by the Obama campaign was to
make people feel that Obama was a member of their communities, too. One of the ways to
achieve this for the campaign was to use a personal style of communication, which was
something natural for new media conversations. Obama became the only candidate in the
race who adopted these codes of new media communication and benefited from them.
For instance, in a YouTube address How to Make This Country Better, Obama

intentionally used the YouTube style of communication. The video is a call for young
people to share their personal stories and ideas via YouTube on how to make the US a
better place. Hi everybody--this is Barack Obama! he says as he looks directly into the
camera, just as all users do when capturing themselves with their web-cameras. He speaks
looking into a shaking camera, we can see rough transitions (014; 040, 115, 130) that
are not covered with another video nor with a flash (as demanded by professional TV
standards). Sometimes, instead of his face, we see some other things that are filmed with a
shaking camera and look amateurish. So the overall effect is that Obama did the video
himself. Some users even made fun of him, taking it seriously:
skysnet haha. first time he seen a webcam. he is sticking his face__ too close! good
message regardless.
doombob Millions raised by your campaign, yet you can't afford a tripod for this short
shaky video? Ha! Joking of course. This is a great way to show that change is
happening all around on a day-to-day level. Win or lose this presidential race, you are
still going to leave an impact __ on this country.
But although the piece looks like an amateur video blog, what we in fact have here
is just a style. The evidence is the angle from which he looks at the camera and the quality
of the picture suggest that its a web camera built in to his computer, but at the same time
the camera is shaking. Thats common in amateur video, except for the fact that built-in
cameras cant shake. Nevertheless, it seems those who made the video achieved their goal.
Most of 1,300 comments gathered are positive and refer directly to Obama:

sciscoekidd How__ cool is that?? Finally someone talkin' to the public on our level! I
was rootin' 4 Rudy G.up until just a few minutes ago!
Hypatia25 Good job Barack, the more you speak directly to the nation... The more
americans hear you.
MajonezTube Interesting, and quite cool that he speak right to
the_r YouTubers :)

Another example of adopting a style of a particular media tool is Obamas text

messaging campaign, where most of the time he was casually (as The Washington Post
noticed) referred to by his first name only:
"Barack has chosen Senator Joe Biden to be our VP nominee. Watch the first ObamaBiden rally live at 3pm ET on www.BarackObama.com. Spread the word!"
The effect achieved, Obama was accurately inserted into his supporters private space,
which was one of the campaign goals. To me, texting is the most personal form of
communication, Scott Goodstain explained to The Washington Post. Your phone is with
you almost all the time. You're texting with your girlfriend. You're texting with your
friends. Now you're texting with Barack.
Being consistent and knowing that most of their subscribers were young people,
staffers were talking with them in their language:

Register 2 vote. 2 wks left n it tales 5 min.

Thats not the way a traditional official address from a campaign would typically
sound, but thats the way people usually communicate via text. Another detail: campaign
strategists mentioned that they wanted people to feel they were in dialogue with Obama, so
when people were responding on the campaign texts with questions or comments, a
response would come either from a robot or from a campaign staffer (Vargas, 08/20/2008).
The same idea of sounding natural was used in the email campaign. Whenever
staffers were emailing people, they would refer to recipients by their names and they would
sign emails with full names and official titles. Their emails didnt look too formal, nor did
they remind recipients of spam; they were just emails from friends. Even those who
analyzed Obamas email campaign, like a writer Jeff Selin, couldnt help but to refer to
Obama by first name in their reports:
Luckily, Barack emailed me directly on occasion. His subject lines shared
sentiments like: Its in your hands, Jeff. Personalizing the subject line?
Why not? I subscribed to the newsletter and so by this virtue, Im supposed
to be onboard as an agent of change for the Democratic Party. Barack also
wrote to ask me poignant questions in subject lines like: Will you join me
on election night? You bet! Vice president elect Joe Biden emailed with
My Wife as one of his subject lines. The email began, Jeff All the
emails always began with my first name (a level of personalization the
McCain emails generally ignored.) Joe wrote: My wife Jill is an
extraordinary woman. Thanks, Joe. I feel more connected to the community
already. The funny thing is that Im not being sarcastic (2009).
This personal style of communication adopted by the Obama campaign served the
campaign goal of cultivating the sense of community and the positive image of the

candidate. Through this casual style of communication, which was natural for new media,
people felt Obama was close to them and thought of him as of someone they know. This
may be why the second most popular reason why people supported Obama was his
character.
In summary, the Obama campaign developed new techniques and improved upon
existing techniques as it communicated with potential voters through new media. The
Obama campaign benefited greatly from the fact that his competitors campaigns did not
approach new media with the same level of finesse. Therefore the Obama campaign
teaches us many valuable lessons for future campaigns.

CONCLUSIONS

This research paper confirmed all three hypothesis stated in the beginning, and
revealed lessons that can be learned from the Obama new media communication campaign.
Hypothesis
Hypothesis 1: It was Obamas new media communication strategy that was
the main reason young people, when they voted, preferred his promise for change to
his party affiliation and favored his character over his experience.
The Obama campaign was build upon such terms as change, unity, and hope.
Obama filled the Internet with these messages using both advertisements and free
platforms. As a result, his name became associated with these words. Even those young

people who were originally Republicans preferred to vote for the person who promised
change instead of the one who was a Republican but didnt really promise anything that
concrete.
People also favored Obamas character while, for example, those who supported
Clinton preferred her experience. Having been known as a politician for only four years
(since his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004), Obama knew he would
have to attract people with something other than experience. So his communication strategy
aimed at young people was promoting his character. Through the way his campaign
communicated, he became a member of an online community, and was close to his
supporters and staying positive (as oppose to McCain, for example). So people felt like
they knew Obama better than other candidates and could rely on him, if not because of his
experience then at least because of his personality.
Hypothesis 2. Obamas new media communication strategy contributed to
the election results only as a part of a complex organizing mechanism, which the
whole campaign represented. This mechanism was made up to promote Obama
through building communities, enabling and promoting bottom-up activities. By the
time the campaign started, those already were the main trends of the contemporary
new media communication--social networks and user-generated sites (such as
YouTube). So the strategy built upon those technologies worked especially
effectively for the candidates purposes.
Candidate Obama wanted to apply his community organizing experience to politics

and he wanted to build the campaign bottom-up. He also understood that competing with
such famous politicians as Clinton and McCain he would have to garner support from
young people and embrace new technologies for reaching them out. Even he himself didnt
expect the Internet work so effectively for his purposes. What I didn't anticipate was how
effectively we could use the Internet to harness that grassroots base, both on the financial
side and the organizing side. That, I think, was probably one of the biggest surprises of the
campaign, just how powerfully our message merged with the social networking and the
power of the Internet, he told The New York Times. That happened because by the time
the campaign started, communities were already the main online trend (in 2007 social
networking sites became more popular than sites with adult entertainment, which had
always had leading positions). The same situation also developed with user activities, as in
2007, YouTube started to get more traffic than all the networks sites all together. That is
to say that the idea of participatory communication on the Internet clashed with Obamas
idea of participatory politics.
It has to be mentioned that it was not Obamas new media communication strategy
alone, that resulted in his victory among young voters and people in general. Nor was it the
idea of organizing not the idea of building campaign bottom-up. What brought him the
victory was a complex system that joined all three together with the timely message of
change, the charismatic candidate and money. Obamas election campaign became the most
expensive campaign in US history, so while claiming that new media communication
strategy worked for him effectively, we have to realize that someone who spent $26 million

on the Internet was bound to outdo someone who spent six times less money on it.
Hypothesis 3. The new media strategies of Obamas main opponents, Hillary
Clinton and John McCain, were ineffective, and failed to harness the power of
communities and user activities effectively. This left Obama as the only one who
fought for the young electorate, and helped secure his victory among Millenials.
For a number of reasons, Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain both didnt
consider youth to be a crucial part of electorate for them. Both preferred to target older age
groups and, for that reason, used traditional media more than the new media. Senator
Barack Obama by contrast was aiming at young people and small donations. As this
research showed, the history of the youth vote in the US revealed that young people
traditionally responded to those presidential candidates who were calling to them, and that
while tended to respond well they also tended to turnout poorly. That is why Obamas idea
to run a youth-orientedded campaign was reasonable, but risky too. The high risk level
made him develop a communication strategy that would hold young peoples interest and
drive them to the voting booth. That is how his new media communication strategy
emerged.
Furthermore, both McCain and Clinton were also relying on big donors, which also
led to them overlooking the potential of new media. Obama learned from his predecessors
Dean (2004) and McCain (2000), whose experience revealed the power of the new media
as a machine for gathering large amounts of small donations. So while his opponents were
working on big donors and older voters offline or through traditional media, Obama was

spreading his message online, engaging young voters and raising money with their help.
Lessons From the Obama Campaign
There are several lessons that should be learned from the 2008 new media
communication campaign. The new media communication strategy developed during the
election campaign 2008 is a useful example how to reach young people using the new
tools.
1.

New media are different from the old ones. They are based on the
principle of two-way communication and should not be used simply as
channels for transmitting information.

2.

Millenials and other online users are willing to act and participate in
social and political life of the country. It is now important that those
who want to communicate with people are open to their ideas and are
actually listening to them.

3.

Every new media tool is based on certain codes of communication and

behavior, which should be followed. This includes the frequency of
updates, the level of personification, the type of messages that can be
communicated via the channel and the policy regarding other users. For
example, a mistake made by Clinton in using Twitter was that while she
had many tweets, she herself didnt follow anybody. And Twitter users
want to see that those whom they follow do the same. What McCain did

wrong, while having Twitter account, is that he didnt tweet often

enough, thus never managed to garner any significant amount of
followers. Another example had to do with cell phones. This is a very
personal device, which people normally carry with them all the time. For
that reason, its an effective way to reach people, but one also should be
very delicate when using it for political means, as is seen by many as a
private rather than public space. Using casual language accepted for text
messaging, not texting too often and responding to subscribers texts
helps to keep a personal connection.

The Meaning of the Campaign

Obamas new media communication campaign was groundbreaking in
many terms and political campaigns of the future will be based on his experience.
But what should be kept in mind of politicians and communication strategists is that
the real value of the campaign was in how it approached new media in a particular
context and treated them differently from what was known before. And as new
kinds of media will keep appearing, so politicians should focus on s should be
coming up with new approaches to using them.

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APPENDIX #1 -- CAMPAIGN SPENDING

Obama
Sector

Description

Administrative

Travel

$60,789,709

Salaries & Benefits

$58,831,126

Miscellaneous Administrative

$21,127,418

Postage/Shipping

$16,841,166

Rent/Utilities

$10,620,173

Supplies, Equipment & Furniture

$4,790,414

Administrative Consultants

$1,432,820

Food/Meetings
Campaign Expenses

Contributions

$32,023,973

Polling/Surveys/Research

$28,048,988

Materials

$7,759,859

Political Consultants

$3,543,259

GOTV

$899,546

Miscellaneous Campaign

$550,929

Campaign Direct Mail

$110,000

Parties (Fed & Non-federal)

Candidates (Fed & Non-federal)

$5,033

Fundr Direct Mail/Telemarketing

Fundraising Consultants

$28,590,559
$1,357,740
$162,930
$28,100

Broadcast Media

$244,600,266

Miscellaneous Media

$133,212,024

Internet Media

$26,555,479

Print Media

$20,462,672

Media Consultants

Transfers

$5,661,816
$9,115

Fundraising Events

Other

$40,255,727

Committees (Fed & Non-Federal)

Miscellaneous Fundraising

Media

$437,144

Campaign Events

Contrib Refunds

Fundraising

Total Expenditures

Charitable Donations
Miscellaneous Transfer
Federal Transfer

$2,739,204
$130,055
$7,500,000
$7,002

Uncoded

not yet coded

$477,995

Unknown

Insufficient Info

$618,203

Source: OpenSecrets.org, Center for Responsive Politics

McCain
Sector

Description

Administrative

Travel

$37,710,370

Salaries & Benefits

$24,023,885

Postage/Shipping

$8,590,415

Supplies, Equipment & Furniture

$5,544,163

Miscellaneous Administrative

$5,538,025

Administrative Consultants
Campaign Expenses

Materials

$10,299,215

Campaign Direct Mail

$7,434,810

Polling/Surveys/Research

$4,201,255

Political Consultants

$2,245,705

Parties (Fed & Non-federal)

$18,631,762

Contrib Refunds

$10,342,252
$16,397

Candidates (Fed & Non-federal)

$9,774

Fundraising Consultants

$6,471,826

Fundr Direct Mail/Telemarketing

$5,718,273

Miscellaneous Fundraising
Fundraising Events

$4,559,919
$390,929

Broadcast Media

$63,492,753

Miscellaneous Media

$60,517,974

Internet Media
Media Consultants
Print Media

Transfers

$11,354
$-595,062

Committees (Fed & Non-Federal)

Other

$47,757
$11,726,751

GOTV

Media

$310,189

Campaign Events

Miscellaneous Campaign

Fundraising

$19,160,774

Rent/Utilities

Food/Meetings

Contributions

Total Expenditures

Charitable Donations
Loan Payments

$4,654,183
$727,154
$7,460
$12,386,973
$8,695,028

National Party Transfer

$32,251,482

Federal Transfer

$20,772,134

Uncoded

not yet coded

$820,961

Unknown

Insufficient Info

$160,572

Source: OpenSecrets.org, Center for Rresponsive Politics

APPENDIX#2 -- HARVARD INSTITURE OF POLITICS POLL

In the fall of 2008, the Harvard Institute of Politics conducted a youth survey in
which it asked respondents to name the reasons why they were going to support candidates
they picked. The results suggest that Obamas communication strategy worked better than
the other candidates strategies.
Can you please tell us the main reason that you are supporting:
Hillary Clinton
Her experience............................................. 43%
Agree on policy............................................ 21%
She is a woman............................................ 11%
Prefer her to Obama (general)...................... 5%
Bill Clinton.................................................. 4%
She cares about people like me..................... 3%
Other............................................................ 13%
Barack Obama
Need for change........................................... 25%
His character................................................ 16%
Agree on policy............................................ 12%
Hope and unity............................................. 10%
Prefer him to Clinton.................................... 10%
Electability................................................... 3%
Race............................................................. 2%
His international appeal................................ 1%
Other............................................................ 8%
John McCain
Agree with his policy positions.................... 31%
He is the best candidate................................ 29%
He is a Republican/ Conservative................. 23%
His experience............................................. 5%

His character................................................ 5%
Other............................................................ 6%

Most of those - 43% - who supported Hillary Clinton claimed the most important
thing they liked about her was her experience, 21% agreed with her policy and 11% liked
her because she was a woman. As for John McCain 31% appreciated his policies most,
29% thought he was the best candidate, and for another 23% the crucial factor was his
party affiliation. The reasons why people supported Barack Obama are dramatically
different: 25% said the reason was need for change, 16% found his character appealing,
12% agreed with him on policy, 10% highlighted hope and unity. His race mattered to only
2% (compare with gender preference in Clintons case) and none of the people cared about
his party affiliation (compare with McCain), nor about his experience (compare with both
Clinton and McCain).
These figures show that people who supported Obama responded to his messages
and his image. We see that the main slogan of the Obama campaign Change We Need
penetrated into youths minds and changes stuck with the candidates name (along with
hope something that Obama was repeatedly declaring, too). His character was the most
important thing for the quarter of those who were going to support him. By comparison,
character was cited rarely by McCain and Clinton supporters as a reason for their support.
It was the part of Obamas communication strategy to became closer with supporters,
which as we can now see he did, since people found it possible to think they knew what his
personality was like and could rely on it. With McCain and Clinton, people cared mostly

about their policies. But policy as well as experience is a broad term and since Obamas
supporters got more specific messages, only small part of those who were going to support
him cited his policies as the main reason for their support.

APPLICATION #3 THE HISTORY OF THE YOUTH TURNOUT

Abstract (no more that 350 words) summary

VITA

Ekaterina Vladimirovna Alexandrova, daughter of Vladimir and Nadezhda

Alexandrov, was born on February 2, 1982, in Leningrad, USSR. After graduating in 2004
from the School of Journalism at the Saint-Petersburg State University, she worked for
various newspapers and TV programs in Russia. In 2007 she entered Media and
Communications Program at the University of Westminster in London as a Chevening
Scholar. After she received a Graduate Certificate, she moved back ro St.-Petersburg,
Russia where she worked as an Editor-in_chief for a youth TV program Igra Uma. She
then received the Fulbright scholarship from the US Department of State and entered
Communications and Media Studies program at Fordham University. She worked on her
masters thesis under the mentorship of Dr. Beth Knobel.