Obama’s online revolution: boom or bust?

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama swept campaign records with his spectacularly wired political campaign that turned into a template for political candidates from Afghanistan to Israel.

Using some of the best brains in the business, the Obama 2008 campaign unleashed legions of cyber-savvy supporters wielding an arsenal of social networking sites, user-generated videos, blogs and cyber fund-raisers to get their man into the White House.

But that was Obama the political candidate. As US president, political pundits warned, Obama was bound to disappoint his online fans.

The grumbling started early in his presidency. Just days after his inauguration, political blogs featured loud complaints that Obama’s techie supporters had been “pumped and dumped” and that the president had left Americans “twisting in the wind of Twitter”.
 
Exactly a year after Obama’s historic election victory, political-tech gurus are wondering if the Obama online revolution has gone bust.

Not quite, says Andrew Rasiej, a leading US political-technology expert and founder of Personal Democracy Forum, a New York-based organisation covering the intersection of politics and technology.

“Comparing Obama’s campaign to the presidency is like comparing apples and oranges,” says Rasiej. “Obama had 13 million people in his database during his presidential campaign. It’s a lot easier to get them to do one thing on one day,” he said referring to the goal of getting voters to vote for Obama on Election Day. “It’s quite another to get them to agree on health policy, education, energy, the war in Afghanistan…it would be utopian to gather all his supporters into a collective homogeneous coalition to help him pass his agendas as president.”

Changing the wheels of government

Analysts and ordinary Americans who scratch below the surface of the latest political setbacks concede that on the technological front, the Obama administration has forever changed the way the wheels of the US government work.

“Obama is the first president to use 21st century information technology as a means of communicating his agenda and encouraging grassroots support,” notes Rasiej.

On his very first day in office, Obama signed an Executive Order calling for all US government agencies to "establish a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration."

A vast range of government agencies today succeeded in manoeuvring complex privacy and copyright issues to get their organisations on to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, making their policies accessible to the public.

The departments of energy, housing and even defence – to name just a few - have opened up employee access to social-networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter. Several US government agencies now have YouTube channels and the US Library of Congress today posts free historical photos on Flickr.

 Twitter with a bang, not a whimper

One year after his election, Obama’s official campaign website has seamlessly switched identities, reflecting his changing statuses and the instantaneous nature of cyber communication.

The day after Obama’s Nov. 4, 2008 election victory, his campaign site morphed into a transitional administration site, which lasted until Jan. 20, 2009, when he was inaugurated into office.

Today, the Obama for America (OFA) organisation has given way to Organizing for America (also OFA). The original aim, to get Obama into the White House, has changed to “building on the movement that elected President Obama,” according to the website.

A panel on the site, titled “Obama Everywhere”, provides links to the US president’s accounts on a plethora of sites including Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr and Digg.

Critics complained that the Obama administration took its time getting on Twitter, the micro-blogging site that uses the relatively cheap and freely available medium of SMS texts.

But when it did, on May 1, with its first posting on Twitter, the Obama administration did it with a bang, not a whimper.

It’s first, brief posting – sticking with the 140-character Twitter message limit – told Americans they could learn more about the H1N1 influenza by signing up with social network accounts by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) the operational arm of the US Health Department.

Some of the more successful examples of the Obama administration’s new media PR wizardry was the manner in which his communications team diffused the message of his famous “Reaching out to the Muslim World” speech, which he delivered on June 4 in Cairo.

An economy of abundant dissent

The crux of the new online political movement, experts say, is a reversal of communication structure between the governing and the governed.
 
“The 20th century presidential communication was always top-down,” explained Rasiej. “The president had to depend on the newspapers and TV to interpret the mood of the public. But in the 21st century, the Internet offers an economy of abundance where there are no limits to the length and depth of a president’s communication.”
 
What the new communications revolution does not do is the stuff of real-life revolutions: getting actors to think en masse. And that, is the new lesson in new media that Obama and his advisors are starting to learn – sometimes painfully.