You cannot replicate the Obama campaign

As you may recall, yesterday I wrote about some things that got my goat, notably how there’s a meme among political consultants that a campaign can recreate the Internet success of Barack Obama’s campaign. I used as an example something from Politics Magazine, “Be Like Obama, But Better – We’ll teach you how Barack Obama ran the first campaign of the 21st century. You’ll find out exactly what he did and how you can replicate his success at any level of government and from any side of the political spectrum.”

The gentleman who wrote that line, the publisher, Jordan Lieberman, commented and said that it got a “great response” and that Campaigns & Elections has “been conducting successful trainings since 1983.”

That’s all well and good, but the fact is that political communications on the Internet has drastically changed from just two years ago. What worked for the 2008 primaries may need to get a serious evaluation now. And, it still stands – you cannot replicate what Obama did.

Obama was the right candidate at the right time. His was truly a celebrity candidacy, and he brought in some of the best and brightest to run his tech operation. Thanks to his incredible fundraising appeal, Obama could adequately fund a massive Internet effort, which most campaigns cannot.

Regardless, every campaign is trying to clone that effort. That is a mistake. First, unless your candidate is named Arnold Schwarzenegger, he or she is not a celebrity and is already behind the times, because Obama connected at exactly the right time with the universe of people connecting through new technologies. Second, you’re not going to have the resources, period. There’s a hierarchy of needs in a campaign, and there’s no way you’re going to raise enough money to, on scale, spend what Obama did without harming other aspects. Third, there are new Republican audiences getting involved on the Internet (largely older voters) that can and are being targeted, but the web is becoming much more cluttered and reaching these voters is becoming harder. Really – your mom is on Facebook.

So, you have to stand out from the pack. The key here is not to try a cookie-cutter approach to mistakenly try to replicate the Obama Internet strategy. What campaigns need to do is learn from what went down in 2008. You study it, figure out what tools were used, how they were used, and how to use them to connect to your specific audience. The first thing you’ll learn is that you can’t replicate President Obama’s success. The second thing you’ll learn is that you won’t want to replicate his tactics because he was connecting with a different audience on the web.

Don’t forget to keep up, though. You need to synthesize those tools with what is happening now. Technology and Internet tools are changing from day to day, week to week, month to month. If you run with a year-old Internet plan, you’ll probably get beat.

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