The Secret Sauce

Both Barack Obama and John McCain used the Internet to reach voters this election—but Obama mastered the medium early “and exploited it to the hilt,” says Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum and co-founder of TechPresident.com. There’s no question: Election 2008 will go down in the books as the first nationwide political contest for social capital.

In an interview today with Cause Global, Rasiej credits Team Obama’s “culture of belief in the Internet” for building a movement for change among ordinary citizens energized via social media into a community of engaged, viral marketers for Obama’s campaign. The Web strategy, says Rasiej, was critical in helping the Illinois senator win the White House. (Indeed, an analysis of the vote today by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press says that without a doubt, “the overwhelming backing of younger voters was a critical factor in Obama’s victory.” Obama drew two-thirds—or 66 percent—of the vote among those younger than age 30, Pew reports. In addition, Trendrr, an online statistics mashup tool, shows Obama had a clear lead in using social media to connect to his audience, as well as an overall lead in winning the attention of the blogosphere as a whole. On social networks, Trendrr says, Obama held a big lead over McCain, with 844,927 MySpace friends compared with McCain’s 219,404. Between November 3rd and 4th (election day) alone, Obama gained more than 10,000 new friends, while McCain only gained about 964. On Twitter, says ReadWriteWeb, Obama gained 2,865 new followers between November 3rd and 4th, for a total of 118,107, while John McCain’s Twitter account only had 4,942 followers in total.)

Team Obama also saw an opportunity in exploiting the flagging credibility of mainstream media—again chiefly among younger voters. “[Obama’s team] leap-frogged the mainstream media by producing content that they knew would get distributed for them [via social media] once it was uploaded,” Rasiej said. Especially in the final days before November 4th, Obama’s campaign sent daily emails and text messages directly to supporters, urging them to vote with friends, participate in phone drives, and volunteer at campaign events—even offering up a contest in which last-minute donors could be selected to attend Obama’s election-night party in Chicago. Says Rasiej:

“Going forward, social capital will become increasingly more valuable than fundraising dollars…The political power of the future will be a question of how robust and engaged a political entity’s [social] network will be”—not just how much money a candidate has in the bank or how many friends he/she has in Congress.”

A key lesson for cause activists everywhere from the election? Says Rasiej: “What we’re really seeing here is the reaction of a new network publicsphere—or, you could argue, a whole new political media ecology, a generational shift that’s empowering an entirely new human experience of participatory, civic engagement. It’s taking our former notions of civic engagement and redefining it as something continuously very relevant to people’s lives.”

For more on the lessons for nonprofits in Election 2008, check out Tom Watson’s post today at onPhilanthropy.com, where he is a consultant and writer. Watson is also the author of the forthcoming Cause Wired, a book about the use of social media in advocacy.

Writes Watson: “While there is a temptation among those who track causes and online fundraising to separate political organizing from philanthropy, I think that’s a mistake—it’s wishing for a division that the audience simply won’t tolerate going forward. It’s like hoping that a print classified operation will continue to grow during the age of Craigslist. Young people don’t separate their causes into neat little boxes labeled politics and charity. They simply respond to what moves them, what their friends recommend, what they believe might change the world.

“...It’s no accident that my nonprofit clients are asking about Web sites like Barack Obama’s. The [old] order is rapidly fading.”

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy.

Read more stories by Marcia Stepanek.