Life has been full this summer, especially because we recently took on a role helping Gregor Robertson and Vision Vancouver's exciting campaign to win the Mayor's and city council seats this November. Gregor is an old friend (and client, we helped his Happy Planet in years past, though their current website is not ours) and he has demonstrated through the Vision nomination campaign that he may indeed be "Canada's Obama", a new kind of politician with an authentic style, a compelling vision, and the ability to run a very open, people-powered campaign that inspires people and motivates hundreds of volunteers to get involved in meaningful ways.
For research on Gregor's campaign we've been spending a lot of time on Obama's site. It is truly remarkable. Obama is not only the most compelling and articulate politician to come along in a generation, but he is a true "net roots" candidate who gets how how the web works and how to reach and move people in our busy modern world.
In fact, I can confidently say that Obama's website, done by our colleagues at Blue State Digital, and managed by over 70 online staff, is the best online campaign website I've ever seen. This blog post "6 lessons we can learn from Obama's online marketing strategy " paints a compelling case for how effective it's been and some of the tools and techniques they've used to get there. $200M raised online in the past 8 months is a pretty darn nice success metric.
What a lot of the articles don't say is how Obama has really achieved this. And here's the rub – as great as Blue State's tools are, it's not about the tools. Obama has succeeded thus far because he is running a true "web 2.0" or open style of campaign. He lives and breathes the values of the web – which are anathema to the old style command and control leaders so often found in business and politics.
Obama is:
- Open and transparent, sharing important information with people and opening up traditionally closed systems (like party conventions) to the world
- He's collaborative, playing well with others both in his campaign and in his policies
- Through his speeches and written statements he can be hair-tinglingly real and authentic
- But most important of all for success online, he is highly participative in his approach. Check out the messaging on the site – he is not leading a movement about him, it's a movement about "you", and he makes that clear everywhere. And you believe it. Wow.
Gregor shares a lot of these attributes, which makes him such a compelling force here at home. Both these guys get it, they model a new way of not just communicating but of being, and it resonates with more and more people who are hungry for meaning and change, and want to help.
Gail Sheehy in Vanity Fair last month wrote an insightful and in depth analysis of how Obama beat Hilary Clinton against all odds. Again, it sure wasn't about technology, it was about a sea change in the culture that the web is riding:
Hillary's campaign had failed to understand that America was in the midst of a national passage from the old-style confrontational politics of the boomer generation-a divisiveness perfected by both the Clinton and Bush administrations-into a new style of Netroots politics, open-sourced and inclusive, multi-racial and multicultural.
You can see the results in everything these men do. It's attractive. It's inspiring. It reaches people, and it moves them to get engaged.
My hat goes off to Obama for building what is surely the best online campaign the world has ever seen, and for running an open campaign that truly cares about involving people in meaningful ways. We'll be helping Gregor do his best to emulate that. Let's hope it helps engage enough tuned-out people to take their message of big hope and big change into the seats of power this November. The world needs this new leadership in a bad way.
