Barack Obama Loves Facebook, Essay Example

Social media is changing the way the country is being run. Not only that, but in Obama’s last two campaigns, the president relied heavily on a new form of voter awareness, campaigning, and reaching out to his voters. Facebook is a platform that allowed Obama to have a campaign that cost little money, gave him direct access to voters, and gave voters direct access to him. The social media platform is completely transparent and helped Obama gain most of the youth vote. Obama’s use of social media was innovative and won him not only his 2008 but was key in his victory in 2012.

Young Voters Love Obama

Obama used his online campaign to “raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped [him] topple the Clinton machine and then John McCain and the Republicans” (Carr para. 5). Obama’s use of social media allowed him to enter into the Whitehouse with a political base as well as “millions of names of supporters” (Carr para. 6) that Obama has direct and immediate access to. Obama has a network of people on which he can use to further his agenda, campaign, and help him understand voting trends and what voters are looking for. Facebook “likes” are the new voice of the people. If something is trending on Facebook then it’s important on a social scale and the number of “likes” the trend has, the number of potential voters and network base Obama may have access to if he in turn supports the trending agenda (if it’s something about the environment that’s trending then Obama can give a speech and power behind a bill or cause in order to support that trend.

Obama & Web Love Affair

Obama also uses the Web such as his page “Change.gov” as a “digital gateway for the transition” (Carr para. 6) between information and action. When the Bush administration entered the Whitehouse they used old school rolodexes, called people on the phones, used Karl Rove’s list of voters, as well as used snail mail (Carr para. 7). But these tools were antiquated and expensive. The Obama camp used the Web at almost zero cost (payment to workers exceeded anything else). In fact, “data driven were carrying the day in parts of the political process” (Issenberg 10) as was the case when Harry Reid used such data to see what motivated voters on an online format, and to see how “neighborhoods voted on ballot initiatives (which show voter opinions on controversial issues like marijuana, taxes, and eminent domain) to define political ideology of election precincts with a nuance impossible to gauge in partisan vote totals” (Issenberg 9). This type of “open-source campaign” (Carr 9) is unprecedented in the history of presidential campaigning. Carr states that special-interest groups as well as lobbyists will have to “contend with an environment of transparency and a president who owes them nothing” (Carr 9) thereby keeping campaigning and debt separate elements. Through Obama’s use of social media, he is now a president that doesn’t need the Democratic Party to create a brand for him, who doesn’t need a bevy of ground troops doing mass calls since emails and Facebook and Change.gov are being used, nor does he need money because all of these things he’s already acquired through social media (Carr 10).

Obama’s Chicago Test Tube

After Obama won the 2008 campaign he sent his campaign team to Chicago to gear up for the next election so that they would be prepared to approach voters on the ground with more voter information than any preceding campaign (Balzpara 3). What made Obama’s 2012 campaign different than his 2008 campaign was that his team called for more “research, testing, analysis and innovation (Balz para 4). Obama’s campaign has something that other campaigns didn’t have, that was a digital director, “chief technology officer, a chief innovation officer and a director of analytics…the team hired software engineers and data experts and number-crunchers and digital designers and video producers” (Balz 9). This allowed the 2008 campaign to be data driven, but in order to recreate the former campaign’s success, Obama was instructed that he’d have to do more and be different.

Obama’s Second Child Isn’t Sasha

Obama’s next campaign was innovative because it “produced software that allowed all of the campaign’s lists to talk to one another” (Balz 10); a software is known as Narwhal. This is the donor list, campaign list, volunteer list, etc. The next goal of the 2012 campaign was to organize. The campaign needed a way to allow all members of its campaign (field organizers, volunteers, state directors, staff) to communicate instantly and seamlessly. To fulfill this need, the Obama team came up with Dashboard a “central online organizing vehicle” (Balz 11). One thing that Dashboard did quite well was that it allowed users to reach out to their friends and family online. Voter data and research shows that people are more likely to listen to someone they know as opposed to a random call or knock on the door from a stranger; “Obama’s campaign uses online activity to boost fundraising efforts, recruit volunteers and look for indications of whether they’ve been successful at voter persuasion” (Bloomberg para. 5). The platform allowed voters to turn into advocates by simply logging in and telling their friends, something the campaign called “targeted sharing” (Time Magazine para 4).

Obama Don’t Spend $ Yo

In 2011 the Obama team was spending money on Facebook advertising; “with the Internet an integral part of people’s lives, Obama’s campaign again has the upper hand, leveraging its ability to communicate with masses on different platforms in ways that weren’t possible in 2008” (Bloomberg para. 3). The innovation of using Facebook came when they built “a piece of software that tracked all this and allowed you to match your friends on Facebook with our lists…” (Balz 14). This allowed the team to ask Facebook users to ask their friends to vote for Obama, or, if the friend was unregistered, they were asked to ask their friend to register, or not be undecided; as Time Magazine states, “more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists”(para 3). This worked well because the team only asked people to reach out to a defined number of friends (not all of their friends, just a certain amount). The Facebook access was done through Dashboard: users could log in to Dashboard through their Facebook account and do “targeted sharing” (Balz 14) in which friends shared information or friends’ lists with the team.

Obama Loves Facebook

Such Facebook tactics were made easier by Facebook’s built in share button; in which users can share campaign banners, statuses, etc. and tag their friends in it. What was genius about Dashboard was that it asked specific Facebook users to share information with 10 specific friends. The specificity was a game changer and helped change undecided voters into decided, helped register voters, and spread Obama’s political message.

Obama’s use of Facebook, Web pages, and social media changed the course of his 2008 campaign, and then his innovations in technology and the way that he approached campaigning through a technological lens, further changed his 2012 campaign. The use of Dashboard was what defined his 2012 campaign. Technology and the use of social media make Obama’s campaigns almost grassroots because of its transparency, lack of debt, and door-to-door tactics through a digital platform.

Works Cited

Carr, David. “How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 9 Nov. 2008. Web. 7 Dec. 2014

“How the Obama Campaign Won the Race for Voter Data.” Washington Post. The Washington Post. Web. 7 Dec. 2014.

Issenberg, Sasha. The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns. New York: Crown, 2012. Print.

“Obama Winning Social Media, If #Hashtagwars Really Matter.” Bloomberg.com. Bloomberg, n.d. Web. 07 Dec. 2014.

Scherer, Michael. “Friended: How the Obama Campaign Connected with Young Voters | TIME.com.” Swampland Friended How the Obama Campaign Connected with Young Voters Comments. Time Magazine, 20 Nov. 2012. Web. 07 Dec. 2014.