5 minutes with Obama's social media manager

Last week, I was privileged to attend a roundtable with David Plouffe. David is known as the chief campaign manager for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign in the United States. He is often credited for leveraging social media to organize a grassroots efforts, that eventually led to Obama's victory. 


There was a flurry a questions but the one I asked him was around social media. When he started putting his campaign together, as early as 2006, there was not much social media activity. For example, Twitter was not even around. Social media had also hardly been used by politicians. In that context how did he figure out his social media strategy. 

The first thing he mentioned is that he did not really. The social media campaign grew organically. He highlighted that social media pioneers were naturally gravitating towards support Obama's candidacy. It was then up to David's team to foster an environment where these supporters could express themselves. Initially David created a platform (Obama's web site primarily) where they could meet and exchange ideas. This quickly extended into other channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. David highlighted that the campaign did a good job in using genuine media such as videos (which look 'real') to give a flavour of authenticity to the campaign. What suprized him is that McCain's campaign did not make full use of social media overall even though McCain invented the concept of online fundraising in 2000. 


David was also keen to stress that 'old school' techniques such as email marketing played the most active role in fundraising. According to the Guardian (UK newspaper), the campaign ''included a massive amount of classic door-to-door campaigning, harvested 13m email addresses. During the course of the presidential race more than 1bn emails were sent and people made 4m donations online. Total online donations topped a record $500m (£307m), with the average amount $85.''


It is likely the social media of his campaign was over-stated by the media. Nevertheless, he will be remembered as one of the first campaign managers who understood the concept of fostering community. Recently David announced he was working on another series of projects for Obama.