Obama’s online prowess rooted in Patrick’s 2006 campaign

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Gov. Deval Patrick (D-Milton): Getty Images PhotoMuch has been made this year of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s online campaigning. From his impressive fundraising to the sheer number of people that attend his events, many credit Obama’s online machine as the genesis of a new wave of political campaigning.

Sarah Lai Stirland wrote in Wired about

“From controlling the canvassing operations to corralling e-mail lists, organizing meetings and overseeing national phone drives, Obama's web network is the most ambitious, and apparently successful, internet campaign effort in any presidential race in the web's short history.”

While the innovations of the senator’s Internet campaign have been well documented in the press this year, to many in the Massachusetts political scene this type of online movement isn’t novel. In many ways, Gov. Deval Patrick’s (D-Milton) 2006 campaign laid the groundwork for the online campaign Obama is now utilizing across the country.

The “Obama Nation,” as it is often called, is the result of an online grassroots movement, facilitated by Obama’s campaign, that spreads information virally by granting volunteers information and tools that previously would have only been available to a few campaign officials in earlier elections. This allows voters to hear about the candidate from their friends, not just from campaign ads and events. That word of mouth campaigning, experts say, is quickly become the most effective way to market a candidate. And it is exactly what Patrick, who was an early Obama backer, did in his 2006 campaign.

“You’ve got to get rid of all the preconceived notions about top-down stuff,” Doug Rubin, Patrick’s chief of staff and political strategist in the 2006 campaign, told PolitickerMA.com. “With the new technology there are a thousand individual campaigns and each one is a little bit different. They have their own way of running their campaign and you have to be comfortable with that. But once you get comfortable with that, it is a powerful way to run a campaign.”

When John Walsh, a veteran campaign field organizer and current chairman of the Massachusetts Democrat Party, signed on as Patrick’s campaign manager, he knew immediately that he wanted to use the Internet as effectively as possible. Walsh quickly hired Charles Steelfisher, a Boston Internet consultant who Walsh called, “sort of a strategic genius,” to spearhead the effort.

Walsh and Steelfisher both knew that they had a candidate that most voters had never heard of so they knew they had to run an effective grassroots campaign to spread information about Patrick. To help volunteers with their outreach, they decided to put the entire voter file, a previously treasured document protected by campaigns, online and available to everyone. With that access, volunteers could log onto the Patrick’s web site and download all the contact information for every voter in their neighborhood and approach them on Patrick’s behalf. The Patrick campaign carefully provided training in how to use the voter file and how to campaign on its behalf, but it also effectively ceded the centralized control of the campaign to those volunteers.

“It used to be when you sit around a campaign with the campaign strategists, they had all these tools and they told people what to do,” Rubin said. “Basically what [Walsh and Steelfisher] did, they said we’re going to take all of this stuff and we’re going to give it to real people and let them manage the process. We’re going to let them do updates, do outreach, do their own phone lists and everything. And it worked out amazingly well.”

Sources in the Patrick campaign said this model worked particularly well because Massachusetts has a highly educated and politically active electorate, so deputizing thousands as mini-campaign managers made sense. These campaign managers spread the Patrick message through their own social network, a much more effective way to campaign because hearing the campaign message from a friend instantly gives it credibility.

“Hearing from people you know is much more valuable than hearing from advertisements or the news media,” said Doug Hattaway, a Boston political strategist that was a communications consultant on Patrick’s campaign. “As people get bombarded more and more by the media and advertisements, they are turning more and more to friends and family.”

Allowing volunteers unprecedented access to campaign tools gave them a feeling that they owned part of the campaign.

“The best model is to empower people to mobilize their own social network,” Hattaway said. “That’s word of mouth and that’s the best marketing model there is.” Hattaway also noted that this model is making its way into the business world as companies like Apple run ads featuring real customers talking about their experiences with their iPhone or iPod.

For example, when the campaign would send an email to its volunteers that were organizing on its behalf, they would ask them to forward it to the people they had contacted on behalf of the campaign. In some cases, they would send the email to approximately 40,000 volunteers but it would be forwarded to between 400,000 and 500,000.

Posting the voter file also helped bring more people into the campaign, because once a volunteer created a profile and logged in, the campaign could contact them asking them to work a phone bank, donate money, host a campaign event or anything else.

Most importantly, though, Patrick’s campaign message, “Together We Can,” meshed with the grassroots movement by encouraging people to get involved and take ownership in their community. Rubin said that message came directly from Patrick and naturally fit the online effort.

“It was pretty clear from day one when I met the governor that he had a sense the people were looking for something like that,” Rubin said. “That was the reason he got in the race. He felt that there was something people were looking for that they weren’t getting from their politics – a sense of community, shared responsibility. That message came from him.”

“The amazing piece,” he went on, “was that his message dovetailed so nicely with the new technology. The ability to do the grassroots was a perfect match. He had a message that people were looking for and we had the ability and the tools through the web site and the Internet and the old fashioned grassroots organizing that John Walsh brought to bring all this together.”

Walsh agreed and said the technology wasn’t as important as the volunteer campaign managers introducing and reinforcing Patrick’s message.

“The most important thing,” he said, “is not really the computer or the Internet. What that is doing, if you’re being effective, if enabling person to person direct contact.”

The grassroots online movement allowed volunteers to spread Patrick’s message, Walsh said, so when voters actually saw Patrick speak or his advertisement, they already felt they knew him and his message.

The major concern with this model is the campaign can lose control of their message to volunteers. This bubbled up recently in the Obama campaign, as supporters criticized Obama’s vote on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act on blogs they had created on Obama’s web site.

“It’s a little scary,” Rubin said. “When you do a TV ad or a direct mail piece, you know exactly who is going to be watching, you know the demographics, you can control how many people are going to do it. When you send out an email and you are asking people to forward it, you lose a little bit of that control. But I think you gain some intimacy and the personal touch.”

Patrick’s online outreach has continued since he was inaugurated. His office sends out a weekly update to all of the email addresses it amassed during the campaign as well as a daily update to a smaller group.

“It’s just become a terrific tool that anybody can read,” said Joe Landolfi, Patrick’s senior communications advisor.

The email updates also allow Patrick to communicate with his supporters without having to go through the filter of newspapers and television stations.

“The traditional media plays a very important role, and we try to work through them to deliver a message,” Rubin said. “But there are also other opportunities to deliver a message outside of that now.”

The governor’s office has also reached out to blogs, such as the popular Blue Mass Group, to communicate their message. Rubin currently blogs from home as a representative of the administration on the Blue Mass Group.

It remains to be seen, however, if Obama can capitalize on this model this year.

“Patrick used this [model] at the state level,” Hattaway said. “The question is whether this model will get Obama over the hump at the national level.”

Hattaway also predicted that Obama is likely using models like this one in every battle ground state.

Notably, some of the people that launched Patrick’s online machine (UPDATE, 3:10 P.M.: including Steelfisher) were hired in the early stages of Obama’s campaign to set up his Internet outreach.

To Steelfisher, the brains behind Patrick’s Internet campaign, that 2006 campaign was “one of the real breakthroughs in organizing.” But, he added, there is still a long way to go in Internet campaigning.

“We’re only at the cusp of what can be organized and accomplished online,” he said. “It’s only the beginning.”