Barack Obama's text message guru talks to the Ticket -- Pt. I
President-elect Barack Obama is expected to name the nation’s first-ever federal chief technology officer sometime soon.
According to Obama’s website, the role of the CTO will be to “ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century.”
It’s not surprising that Obama plans a major emphasis on technology. His presidential campaign relied heavily on the latest forms of communication -– like Internet social networking sites and text-messaging -– to organize volunteers, raise funds and get voters to the polls.
Scott Goodstein, a D.C.-based campaign manager, ran all of the text-messaging and mobile communications for the president-elect's campaign. The Ticket recently talked to him in detail about the campaign’s new media strategy, the size of its phone book and that much-talked-about 3 a.m. text message. This is the first of two parts of the interview that will be published this morning.
KL: What was your role in the Obama campaign?
Goodstein: I got involved in February 2007. I had been running a public relations consulting business out of D.C. and I basically closed it and moved to Chicago so that I could help Sen. Obama in the primaries. I had been working for a bunch of antiwar causes and I really felt that Obama was the strongest, clearest voice against the war. I felt he was going to be the best candidate for me and my friends.
KL: When you first got to Chicago, what was the vision for how technology would be used in the campaign?
Goodstein: We were creating both internal online organizing and external organizing. So while we were building out our own social network and tools, I was working on building out our Facebook, MySpace and YouTube pages and about a dozen or so other very specific social networks.
KL: What is the difference between internal online organizing and external organizing?
Goodstein: We like to say that internal organizing is building your own shopping mall and external organizing is campaigning in shopping malls that already exist.
The problem with MySpace or Facebook (which are examples of external organizing) is that you as a campaign don’t own all of the data. You may not have the person’s e-mail address or you may not have the person’s phone number -- if the person opts out of that social network, you have no....
. . . way of getting in touch with them. But they are useful because there are hundreds of millions of people that use these social networks as a daily part of their life.
KL: Was a lot of what you were doing data-driven?
Goodstein: The goal for us was to make sure that we were providing people information on all of these different social networks so that if they never came directly to our website or signed up for our e-mail list they still knew that the campaign was reaching out to them.
The treatments for each of these social networks may be different. It may be that sending out three bulletins a week on MySpace might be all that the folks on MySpace want. But if you’ve signed up for the Barack Obama Twitter feed, you want information from us at least once a day.
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?
Let’s say Barack is appearing on a late-night TV show. If you send it by e-mail, by the time people check their e-mail, the show could be over. Different types of announcements now warrant different types of communications.
KL: Is text-messaging geared to a certain niche?
Goodstein: It obviously skews younger. But 262 million Americans are using mobile phones. That’s roughly 84% of the total population. It’s one of the fastest-growing industries in the U.S.
And with the decline of TV viewership audiences, I think it’s a must for campaigns to be using mobile technology. It’s the only device that’s truly with people for 15 to 24 hours a day.
KL: Was there an “A-ha!” moment when you realized that this was really fertile ground?
You can find Goodstein's answer here.
-- Kate Linthicum
Spkg of txt msgs, reg here 4 cell alerts on ea new Tkt item. RSS feeds also avail here. Now on Kindle 2.
Photo credits: Jae C. Hong / Associated Press (top); Associated Press (Obama in car, bottom).
Andrew Malcolm's immigrant parents repeatedly stressed the importance of active participation in a democracy. Early lessons included learning the alphabetical list of states by watching televised roll calls of national political conventions. That childhood exposure led to a lifelong fascination with politics, including 40-plus years of covering them and a brief stint practicing them as press secretary to Laura Bush in 1999-2000. A veteran foreign and national correspondent, Malcolm served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. He is the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four.
Johanna Neuman is a veteran Washington correspondent for both The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, having covered presidents and politics as far back as Ronald Reagan. A former president of the White House Correspondents Assn., she authored a book on media and foreign policy, “Lights, Camera, Wars.” Most recently she was co-author of the 
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Great article. It demonstrates the current market trend to reach individuals must also be thru social media sites & text messages.
Posted by: Eric Sornoso | January 07, 2009 at 11:00 AM
Great to base US future on new technologies.
But what sort of technology, within what framework ? Without the latter to help focus and guide, these could bring us scattering our resources, playing god or creating Pandora boxes.
Why not using nature as The Framework ? Beside helping focusing and keeping us out of mischief, this would assist us to learn and copy a lot of valuable and sustainable lessons from nature.
We should beforehand recognize that we developed recently our society out of tune with nature to the point that we interfere with it in a dramatic way. We behave as we are not part and parcel as well as dependant on nature but can control it. This is completely wrong and will back fire badly.
Nature is resilient and adapt up too a point. Being a cycle, wherein nothing is created but everything transformed, extra energy caused by greenhouses gases change the climate and already dissipate into larger than usual storm, hurricane and will at a latter stage in earthquakes and tsunamis.
The worst, which is not yet very well known is still to come from the impact that combined extra temperature and carbon will have for example on ocean currents and overall carbon circle …..These could trigger an unstoppable reaction in chain and culminate in the sixth extinction of most of living kinds.
Copying natural processes such as biochemistry to build up layer by layer strong structures, glasses… at room temperature will, for example keep us in a sustainable energy range and dramatically stop our CO2 and temperature unsustainable production. This, jointly with a 80% decrease of CO2 PPM air content by 2050 could save our planet.
PL Lemercier – Renewable Energy Centre – Port Elizabeth – South Africa.
Posted by: Lemercier Pierre-Louis - Renewable Energy Centre - RSA | January 14, 2009 at 02:07 AM