techPresident - Joe Biden - Comments

There is a more personal way coming soon ...

richsr — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:07:37 -0400

So, instead of using text messages (aka "SMS" for Short Message Service) you can use MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) for images, audio video & rich text. Soon we will see such announcements including images and a personal audio message, maybe even a short MMS video. -Rich Sr./Cellyspace.com

How do you not plan for that?

Ryan Alexander — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:11:41 -0400

The selection of the VP is one of the most planned out exercises that a campaign goes through.

It seems really odd to me that they didn't have a plan in place to get the text message out quickly when the media leaked it.

Does it really take 3-4 hrs to get a 146 character text message out the door?

I could see it taking that long if they didn't have the website ready to change over to the new Obama/Biden look, but once again if that was the reason for the delay its incredibly poor planning on their part.

I would have thought they would have had the internet team create a separate version of the website for each possible candidate to 1) prevent leaks from their internet team and 2) to be ready to go if the media leaked it or if some other event caused them to move up the deadline.

This would have also prevented the unfortunate coincidence of having people on the East Coast receive the text message at 3am...

Email vs. SMS

Luigi Montanez — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 17:53:25 -0400

Barack's team missed an enormous opportunity to communicate personally, to me, from Barack.

I think such pretense can work in email, where distinct "voices" can be reinforced over time, and where the From: name is easily set. So the candidate emails about The Big Things, the campaign manager about the political landscape and state of the race, the finance director about fundraising numbers, the field director about volunteering, etc.

But SMS is limited to 160 characters, and there is no From: line. The text message wasn't coming from Barack's personal cell phone number. It came from 62262, the campaign's short code. All users know that Obama himself isn't sending millions of individual text messages. They know that the campaign uses a service to do such a thing.

As such, the campaign just cut the pretense and spoke from the campaign voice. They've done the same for their past messages I've received: "Watch Barack and Hillary together in Unity, NH" and "Watch Barack live in Berlin".

SMS is a very restrictive medium, and I think the decision to embrace those constraints rather than act outwardly phony was a good one by the Obama campaign.

Normal people

Luigi Montanez — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 17:45:03 -0400

Take a step out of your political professional/junkie shoes for a moment. Normal people simply don't sit in front of their computers on a Friday night, refreshing the political insider blogs of ABC News and CNN. When word broke even later on TV, it was extremely late on Friday night, not exactly the time of high viewership. Isn't it quite likely then, that for the vast majority of people who opted in to receive that text message, that the Biden pick was in fact breaking news?

I don't think we'll ever know the concrete numbers, but I do think it's quite presumptuous to assume that all 3 million people who signed up had the news spoiled for them because it was spoiled for you.

Tech President needs to challenge themselve on this.........

Freedomfighter — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 13:11:39 -0400

For all the use of technology the Obama campaign is praised for, they still do not seem to be able to make the best use of it. Even I got that stupid VP text message. So what? I am not an Obama supporter. The Obama campaign appears not to know what to do with the data they are getting or how sort it out.

Worse yet, they have no idea how best to deal with the support they do get. Obama spent as twice as much money on advertising than McCain raised last month, yet Obama is tied in the polls. If I was an Obama supporter, I would have a lot of concerns about being scammed by slick marketing. Why is it that when Obama spends money on ads, the polls favor him even less?

Groups like Moveon are giving away Obama buttons and bumper stickers. Are there limits? How many of these buttons going to Obama fans in Kenya and Indonesia, who are not US voters?

Here are questions which need to be answered: Is Obama just a cult of personality exploiting money from his supporters? Is his campaign merely exploiting feeble-minded people who are emotionally distraught over the state of the world? Is technology merely empowering the meek, ignorant and naive people who do not have ability to resist a cult of personality like Obama?

It's 6am EST and I still haven't been TXTed

Micah L. Sifry — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 06:04:56 -0400

From a tech point of view, the mass txt message seems to have failed. And Patrick is right, waking people up at 3am isn't fun, or funny. I somehow doubt they were trying to see if Hillary was going to pick up the phone.

But from an earned media standpoint, and an organizing standpoint, the mass txt experiment looks pretty successful. Three million names is phenomenal, especially if they can now segment them by zipcode.

Micah

Ron Paul's Revolution Fogged Out In Iowa

littlebier8 — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 17:49:13 -0500

Two nights ago, I wasted considerable time watching CNN, MSNBC, and FOX to monitor Ron Paul's progress. I say "wasted" because in every single pie chart they had percentages for Mitt Romney, Michael Huckabee, and Fred Thomson, and then this gray, foggy section that was "Others." Who was in that section? Well, there was Rudolph Giuliani with roughly 4%, Duncan Hunter with <1%, and Ronald Paul with over 10%. So basically that foggy area in the pie chart represented the "dark horse" candidate, only 3% behind the so-called front-runners Fred Thomson and John McCain, and 6% ahead of the so-called Republican Rudolph Giuliani. Despicable. The mainstream press (I know I sound paranoid and annoyed, and I am) are trying to ignore Paul's message and his support by lumping him into the "Other" category. No, he didn’t win, or even place, but getting 10% with limited news coverage and little position-recognition, in a state known for its pro-war stance, in a predominantly pro-war party is not just noticeable, it's a miracle. He nearly beat two big-name candidates, but is he given credit? No. FOX News is also planning to cut Paul out of a New Hampshire debate tomorrow, prompting the NHGOP to withdraw its support from the debate. I am sorry Rupert Murdoch, but the Revolution won’t be called off because of a little fog.

Draft Bloomberg to Become the First Independent TechPresident!

CitizenSmith — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 19:13:47 -0500

If we want a Tech President we need a President that understands the importance of technology. While many of the democratic candidates are paying lip service to these ideals, none has close to the technological background of Mike Bloomberg. He would make a fantastic leader for this and many other issues, which is why we are trying to Draft Mike Bloomberg for President at UniteForMike.com

Thanks Luigi...

Vermonter — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 19:48:04 -0500

I should have written "BSD-style system." The new DFA-link is indeed quite integrated and very useful.

Blog for America and DFA-Link

Luigi Montanez — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 14:04:11 -0500

Just a quick correction... DFA-Link was not built by Blue State Digital (as was Party Builder and My.BarackObama), it was built in-house in the summer of 2005 (a few months after Dean went to head the DNC). I believe Party Builder launched in the early part of 2006. Later in 2006, we also switched Blog for America into a community blogging platform, tied closely with DFA-Link. So DFA groups have their own blogs on Blog for America. Blog diarists on BFA can include location-aware attributes (city, state, zip) to a blog post, which allows blog posts to be searchable by location:

http://www.blogforamerica.com/state/NJ

Thanks Peter...

Vermonter — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 23:24:58 -0500

You said more clearly what I was getting at, I think.

Social networking is great for creating private networks. But, if you go to the home page of Facebook, for instance, you have no idea what's going on in the site. It is only through the private interactions with "friends" and "groups" that you get to realize the power or interest in the system.

However, during the Dean campaign, if you read through the comments on any post of Blog for America you instantly were able to take the pulse of the active online supporters. Similarly, the Obama HQ blog is almost entirely un-censored as far as I can tell, which encourages a lively discussion. Yet because it's not the only destination for supporters, it seems like the Obama HQ comments section is just one more micro-community in a sense -- as opposed to a central meeting place.

Of course, despite the wonderful sense of shared purpose of Blog for America, the Dean campaign (or really any of the other candidate sites) didn't provide usable tools to allow people to do their own organizing. Nor did it ever embrace the Scoop style community blog model even when it morphed into Democracy for America (which could likely have surpassed Daily Kos, in my opinion, if it had.)

DFA instead opted for the same Blue State Digital system as Party Builder and Obama, DFA Link... Which is really pretty useful in allowing each member to create regional or topical groups to help build micro-communities for local action.

The trick, I suppose, is to do a better job of merging the best qualities of both of these models. But maybe that's just the optimistic view of a "both/and" Obama supporter.

Social Networking vs. Community blogging

Peter Erickson — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 23:56:30 -0500

I think Neil has a really important point about what the Obama campaign was reaching for.

Blue State Digital's platform definitely copies the social networking model more than the community blogging model.

Facebook, for example, suffers from many of the same problems. It has all kinds of internal walls that make organizing and community interaction difficult --- I wonder if/when Facebook will embrace first blogging and then community blogs.

Jerome Armstrong actually had a few comments about this in an interview in an article in The Nation, even tying the difference into a generational distinction:

"He's skipped right over the blogosphere to the younger social networking sites, where he can be embraced in a way that he is more comfortable with," says Armstrong, arguing that Obama's boomer campaign managers prefer to sell him to the Millennials as a cool brand name with its very own catchy slogan, "Generation Obama," that they can embrace.

It raises some interesting questions anyway.

Thanks...

Vermonter — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 13:23:57 -0500

... for the reply, Micah...

I think we do agree largely on this. Thanks for clarifying the comment...

But, I wouldn't necessarily conclude that it's intentional for the purpose of keeping control of public conversations. (It could very well be, but I just don't know).

Rather, might it be more likely that the people in charge of the Web effort just don't quite understand the blog/comment community web site dynamic as those of us who've been living within this world for the past half a decade?

Might there be a bias toward the social networking model, which based on my personal blog-centric experience seems to be a much less user friendly community-building environment?

Despite the lack of a more open system, though, there's quite a lot of conversation in the main HQ Blog comments section, though that hasn't always been the case.

Regardless, the quick embrace of One Million Strong by Obama supporters certainly suggests that there was a hunger for a better system that allowed for easier communication.

Again, I don't really know why they haven't done a better job of using the site to build community, I'm just not sure if "control" is ultimately the root cause.

Thanks again for your response...

-Neil

Obama could do better

Micah L. Sifry — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 12:48:28 -0500

Neil--
I don't think we really disagree with each other about this. The Obama campaign has built a state of the art platform for community engagement, and yet the site buries that community under layers that it alone controls. There's little sense of a lateral network of conversations reaching critical mass on barackobama.com. As Peter Erickson notes, they've received 15,000 policy proposals but done nothing to open up a big conversation around any of them. He writes, "There's a need for a recommended list, for greater visibility of the diaries, for creating more opportunities for interaction, and for increased efforts to highlight the work of independent bloggers and activists." That's exactly our point. As best as we can tell, they're not doing that because they don't want to give up that much control.
Micah

Obama's Control?

Vermonter — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 11:27:57 -0500

You write:

--That said, we wish he didn't tout his own campaign's use of technology as demonstrating how he will open up governance, as we know the Obama campaign has maintained strong control over how its supporters use its web tools.--

As a community member of My.BarackObama.com, I don't really understand this comment. There are plenty of valid critiques of Obama's web operation (an almost carbon-copy of Party Builder, of course -- also built by Blue State Digital), having to do with the way the site is structured that makes connecting in the community a little too circuitous. But also of how the campaign interacts with its supporters through the site. Peter Erickson has a good diary on this at One Million Strong, (a site largely set up to provide a more active discussion area for Obama supporters).

But, control of the tools is not really the problem from my experience. In fact, I'd say just the opposite -- they are there for the use of all community members with little or no mediation. In general, I think there is too little direction for how to use them effectively.

And related: the campaign has started a tech discussion blog:

Neil Jensen
Vermonters For Obama