Today's longread looks at Jim Messina, the man heading up Obama's reelection campaign. Messina's philiosophy toward the campaign is to treat it like an emerging technology company that needs to harness emerging social trends to generate targeted and rapid growth. To achieve this, he toured the U.S. visiting with high-profile executives of major tech companies, including Google's Eric Schmidt. As opposed to in 2008, Obama is the underdog when it comes to fundraising, and as a result, an optimized campaign strategy may be the key to whether or not he achieves a second term.
"Obama's CEO: Jim Messina Has a President to Sell" by Joshua Green
Published in Business Week, June 14, 2012
http://mobile.businessweek.com/articles/2012-06-14/obamas-ceo-jim-messina-has-a-president-to-sell
Eric
Interesting to see him essentially use the type of marketing knowledge that we were reading about last week. I think a lot of people would say twitter/facebook people would tend to already be the liberal democrat voters if you were going to make a blanket statement. However, can Romney really win without a focus on technology? Everything that happens no in business and the world is driven through the internet, there's no reason for an election to be different. Or are people going to simply vote on party lines regardless of what they see?
ReplyDeleteI think you are right that employing technology and social media is essentially a requirement for a national political campaign. It does seem, though, that Messina has taken it a step further in trying to build something (like Dashboard) to better target voters using the information collected from these forms of new media. Theoretically this allows you to solidify the base (and raise more money from them) and also better allocate your persuasive resources (whether it be ads of some type of media or individuals going door-to-door).
ReplyDeleteRight so the question is do they really identify new people? Do they need to target the base or will they go out and vote anyway clearly for him? How does the technology get used to bring in new votes or sway independents?
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