Obama's Internet mastery noticed in Canada

by The Canadian Press — September 4, 2008

VANCOUVER -- Democrat Barack Obama's historic run to his party's presidential nomination owes a lot to his campaign's stunningly successful use of the World Wide Web to mobilize support and raise money.

The lessons of how the Obama campaign exploited Web 2.0 tools such as social networking, video sharing and blogs have not been lost on Canadian political parties as they gear up for an expected federal election.

"It's more than fair to say that we will see the web is going to have a larger effect on this election than any election before in history," says Adam Miron, national director of Young Liberals of Canada.

Politicians have been using the Internet to reach confirmed and potential supporters for more than a decade. But Obama's campaign used the web to build a two-way conversation and recruit a political cyber machine that was both huge and quick on its feet.

That interactivity was a key part of the campaign's effectiveness, says Micah Sifry, executive editor at the New York-based Personal Democracy Forum, a non-partisan group that looks at the evolution of web politics.

"The lesson that Obama taught Hillary Clinton was that in 2008 it isn't enough just to have high name recognition and a kind of one-way conversation using the web," says Sifry.

"That's what she did. She emphasized building a big email list and projecting, using the platform of her website, a message onto other people."

"The message back was 'No, we want a real conversation, not a fake one.' "

Much of the heavy lifting for Obama was done by Blue State Digital, which manages the campaign's online fundraising, support building and networking.

The Washington, D.C., company, which has a long list of political clients on the "progressive" end of the spectrum, says the campaign raised more than US$200 million in small donations through more than two million individual donors.

The campaign's MyBO social-networking application has more than a million individual user accounts, Blue State says. Those users set up thousands of campaign events and through virtual phone banks made more than two million calls to voters during the primary campaign.

Canadian politicos are fascinated by the campaign's use of social networking.

"There's eight million Canadian accounts ... on Facebook," says Nammi Poorooshasb, federal New Democrat director of communications

"We've been looking at ways to mobilize these people in those communities."

Poorooshasb says the party got a potent demonstration of the medium's power in July when it launched a campaign against new fees for incoming cellphone text messages.

"We created a group to oppose those fees," he says. "Nearly 40,000 Canadians joined that group, and this is actually the largest Facebook group to our knowledge that was created by a political party."

That's a major lesson taken from Obama's use of the web, says the Liberals' Miron.

"It's about reaching out, giving back and calls to action, which really makes the big difference," he says.

"You actually ask people for specific help ... on a specific issue. You're asking them to just do something, whether it's start a petition or actually just give money."

Sifry points out it takes time to build up social networks and isn't sure the strategy would translate well in a six-to eight-week Canadian election campaign.

But Blue State's managing partner, Thomas Gensemer, says he's had recent "conversations" with unnamed Canadian political party officials, though there's been no deal to work together.

Gensemer says he believes Blue State's web tools and strategies would, if anything, work better in a parliamentary system.

"The shorter the better, in some ways, for the basics of engagement, because so much of it relies on having immediate calls to action and the sense of timeliness," says Gensemer.

And unlike the U.S. situation, Canadian parties have formal membership lists that can be used via the web to keep people active and engaged between votes, and then to activate them when the writ is dropped.

The bonus for cash-strapped Canadian parties is that web campaigning is fairly cheap compared to advertising in traditional media such as newspapers and television.

"There are things that require really almost no money and almost no technological know-how," says New York web designer Doug Jaeger, who has analyzed the presidential candidates' web presences.

Sifry agrees.

"A very cheap, well-made video on YouTube can amass millions of views," he says. "It just has to have compelling content.

"The blogosphere will spread the word for you. The activists are already linked together and talking to each other."

Besides its main website, the NDP has set up unite4change.ca to build a social network around next Monday's scheduled federal byelections, which would be cancelled if a general election is called.

The Liberals, meanwhile, have set up forum.liberal.ca to solicit grassroots discussion on the party platform.

No Conservative spokesman responded to a request for information on the party's web strategy.

The experts say there's still a demographic gap that sees many people over 35 getting most of their information from traditional sources.

But campaigns that ignore online communities - reasoning they're young and less likely to vote - are also neglecting the activist base that lives increasingly on the web, says Sifry.

"Political news or causes are just part of their daily stream of information," he says.

This kind of web-based mobilization does carry risks. It's harder to control the message if thousands of supporters are doing their own thing on blogs and social networks.

"This is the power of the web, and it's also some of the challenges that come with it," says Poorooshasb.

"What we've found is that the communities in these blog posts and things like that, they set the record straight amongst themselves."

Adds Sifry: "What the net is doing in politics is putting all those conversations that we have around the water cooler on steroids."

"You might see a few people around the water cooler, but it takes you just a few minutes to email 100 people."

Source:CTV