Ryan MacMillan

Now that Barack Obama is the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee, a new conventional wisdom has taken hold in the American political commentariat: it was social media wot won it for Barack. To wit, it was the Obama campaign’s superior leveraging of the tools and processes of social media communications which allowed him to overcome the original conventional wisdom of the primary season, namely that Hillary Rodham Clinton was the inevitable victor.

The CW reached what we might charitably call demented fever pitch in this Sunday’s New York Times whence Noam Cohen wrote of Obama’s ‘Wiki-Way to the Nomination’, (please - a moritorium on all wiki-prefixed portmanteau words for at least a year!) claiming that ‘Barack Obama is the victor, and the internet is taking the bows.’ Cohen notes how much the Obama campaign’s ‘impressive online fund-raising apparatus owes to the enhanced social networking of sites like MySpace, Twitter and YouTube.’ He goes further still, claiming that such social media strategies are analogous to the entire Obama campaign message:

Mr. Obama’s notion of persistent improvement, both of himself and of his country, reflects something newer — the collaborative, decentralized principles behind Net projects like Wikipedia and the “free and open-source software” movement. The qualities he cited to Time to describe his campaign — “openness and transparency and participation” — were ones he said “merged perfectly” with the Internet. And they may well be the qualities that make him the first real “wiki-candidate.”

Yes, folks, it’s the Wisdom of Crowds and collective decision making wot won it. Sigh. Can we please get this straight? What the Obama campaign did (brilliantly, as even this Hillary partisan will admit) is crowdsourcing, which is fundamentally different to collective decision making or collective intelligence. The Obama campaign used the massive crowd of supporters that they generated through social media - media which made that leverage easier to accomplish - they did not allow the crowd to make decisions for the campaign. For once, Kos at the Daily Kos gets it right, telling Cohen: “They’ve made it very easy for people to hop on the band wagon, but those in the back of the wagon still get no say in where the wagon is going.”

A round up of some of the best Barack Obama social media fun and games of the last few months after the jump…

Probably the best thought out discussion of the influence of social media in the Obama victory is from The Atlantic magazine, where Marc Ambinder notes that technological innovation has always stirred up the political process:

Improvements to the printing press helped Andrew Jackson form and organize the Democratic Party… the postal service, which was coming into its own as he reached for the presidency, was perhaps even more important to his election and public image. Jackson’s exploits in the War of 1812 became well known thanks in large measure to the distribution network that the postal service had created, and his 1828 campaign—among the first to distribute biographical pamphlets by mail—reinforced his heroic image… Abraham Lincoln became a national celebrity, according to the historian Allen Guelzo’s new book, Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America, when transcripts of those debates were reprinted nationwide in newspapers, which were just then reaching critical mass in distribution beyond the few Eastern cities where they had previously flourished… Franklin Delano Roosevelt used radio to make his case for a dramatic redefinition of government itself, quickly mastering the informal tone best suited to the medium. In his fireside chats, Roosevelt reached directly into American living rooms at pivotal moments of his presidency. His talks—which by turns soothed, educated, and pressed for change—held the New Deal together. And of course John F. Kennedy famously rode into the White House thanks in part to the first televised presidential debate in U.S. history, in which his keen sense of the medium’s visual impact, plus a little makeup, enabled him to fashion the look of a winner (especially when compared with a pale and haggard Richard Nixon).

Ok, so the bit about FDR’s radio talks holding the New Deal together is a bit reductionsit, but it’s otherwise a great article which puts the Obama social media narrative into some illuminating historical context.

The conventional wisdom about Obama and social media began brewing earlier this year. Advertising Age began trumpeting the Obama social media narrative a few months ago, claiming that “Obama’s rivals should steal from his social playbook”. Whilst back in February, Kyle Flaherty over at the ‘Engage in PR’ blog, started up a conversation about the uses and abuses of the MyBarackObama social site. Also in February, David Parmet at the ‘Advertising Begins at Home’ blog ran with the (wishful?) comparison: “Clinton is from PR, Obama is Social Media” (well, we all want to be like the cool kids, no?). Parmet’s was an interesting idea, subjecting Clinton strategist Mark Penn’s famed ‘microtrends’ to proper scrutiny:

Penn’s thesis of microtrends might strike one at first glance to be an affirmation of the social media approach. After all, small things or communities eventually make up the whole of us. We’re all just dashes on the Long Tail. But as practiced by the Clinton campaign it’s more like the focus-group approach of traditional marketing. Get me a room full of teenagers and they will tell us what every skateboarder thinks. Or in the case of Clinton, get me a room full of boomer women and they will tell us what we want to hear… Does this strike you as the way traditional PR and marketing is done? And how traditional agencies and practitioners approach social media? Pick a ‘community’ you think exists, and pretend to be a part of it while always maintaining the illusion of transparency.

And he concludes with a little Obama-love:

While the Obama campaign is doing it the way it should be done. Appeal to us as people, as individuals and at the same time as part of something bigger than all of us. Stop breaking down populations into ever smaller segments the same way the Nations of Europe split up the map of Africa and Asia in the 19th century. And let your audience tell you the truth, not what you want to hear

But a little caution might become us in the Social Media industry here. The new CW is part of a wider trend in political commentary to explain just how Hillary, the presumptive nominee a year ago, managed to lose. Social media is a nice way of explaining it - it’s shiny, sexy, new, and involves reassuringly statty numbers in the form of online donors (by which means Obama outraised Clinton). But sometimes, we might want to recall some old-fashioned politics, as Drew Westen points out over at the HuffPo. ‘Nothing went wrong’ with Hillary’s campaign, he argues, rather “Hillary Clinton was emotionally outgunned, just as Bill Clinton outgunned his rivals in 1992.” Which is to say that, for all the clamor over Obama’s social media advantage, people still had to want to get on his bandwagon, and that desire was inspired by his message, his old-school political message of change. Let’s not forget that Hillary raised over $200million, accumulated about 18million votes and, had the disturbingly undemocratic caucuses been less important, would probably have clinched the nomination - all with what the CW tells us is a failed social media operation. People voted for Obama not because he had a better Facebook page, or because his staffers twittered more sweetly, but because the Knowledge (the message of change) he was offering voters was more Useful, Desirable, Open and Shareable than Clinton’s. But only just - KUDOS to the both of them.

UPDATE: (indeed) nice podcast from the Podcasting News’ New Media Update on these issues here.