Barack Obama - Politics 2.0 or just a country wanting a change?

I read 2 posts today noting that Barack Obama's victory was largely an Internet driven one. Firstly, Umair Haque has an interesting post on how Barack Obama used modern technologies and ways of organising work to win the election (I've expurgated it a bit):

1. Have a self-organization design. What was really different about Obama's organization? We're used to thinking about organizations in 20th century terms: do we design them to be tall, or flat?

Obama's organization blew past these orthodoxies: it was able to combine the virtues of both tall and flat organizations. How? By tapping the game-changing power of self-organization. Obama's organization was less tall or flat than spherical - a tightly controlled core, surrounded by self-organizing cells of volunteers, donors, contributors, and other participants at the fuzzy edges. The result? Obama's organization was able to reverse tremendous asymmetries in finance, marketing, and distribution - while McCain's organization was left trapped by a stifling command-and-control paradigm.

2. Seek elasticity of resilience. Obama's 21st century organization was built for a 21st century goal - not to maximize outputs, or minimize inputs, but to, as Gary Hamel has discussed, remain resilient to turbulence.

Umair makes the point here that resilience meant developing a superior fund raising system, I wonder if it wasn't the other way round though - or at least more symbiotic.

3. Minimize strategy. Obama's campaign dispensed almost entirely with strategy in its most naïve sense: strategy as gamesmanship or positioning. They didn't waste resources trying to dominate the news cycle, game the system, strong-arm the party, or out-triangulate competitors' positions.

4. Maximize purpose. Change the game? That's 20th century thinking at its finest - and narrowest. The 21st century is about changing the world. What does "yes we can" really mean? Obama's goal wasn't simply to win an election, garner votes, or run a great campaign. It was larger and more urgent: to change the world.

Bigness of purpose is what separates 20th century and 21st century organizations: yesterday, we built huge corporations to do tiny, incremental things - tomorrow, we must build small organizations that can do tremendously massive things.

5. Broaden unity. What do marketers traditionally do? Segment and target, slice and dice. We've become great at dividing markets into tinier and tinier bits. But we're terrible at unifying them. Yet Obama succeeded not through division, but through unification: we are, he contended, "not a collection of Red States and Blue States -- We are the United States of America".

6. Thicken power. The power many corporations wield is thin power: the power to instill fear and inculcate greed. True power is what Obama has learned wield: the power to inspire, lead, and engender belief. You can beat people into subjugation - but you can never command their loyalty, creativity, or passion. Thick power is true power: it's radically more durable, less costly, and more intense.

7. Remember that there is nothing more asymmetrical than an ideal. Obama ended his last speech before the election by saying: "let's go change the world." Why are those words important? Because the world needs changing. A world riven by economic meltdown, religious conflict, resource scarcity, and intractable poverty and violence - such a world demands fresh ideals. We must mold and shape a better world - or we will surely all suffer together. As Obama said: "we rise or fall ... as one people."

Very interesting thoughts, and I think Umair has described very well a number of the emerging principles of influence in the networked world which are well worth keeping in mind.

Secondly, Wired argues that the victory was "Internet Propelled":

Volunteers used Obama's website to organize a thousand phone-banking events in the last week of the race -- and 150,000 other campaign-related events over the course of the campaign. Supporters created more than 35,000 groups clumped by affinities like geographical proximity and shared pop-cultural interests. By the end of the campaign, myBarackObama.com chalked up some 1.5 million accounts. And Obama raised a record-breaking $600 million in contributions from more than three million people, many of whom donated through the web.

"He's run a campaign where he's used very modern tools, spoke to a new coalition, talked about new issues, and along the way, he's reinvented the way campaigns are run," says Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the nonprofit think-tank NDN, and a veteran of Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign. "Compared to our 1992 campaign, this is like a multi-national corporation versus a non-profit."

.....

The campaign also launched web pages and online action groups to fight the underground, e-mail whisper campaigns and robo-calls that surfaced in battleground states. In one effort, the campaign urged supporters to send out counterviral e-mails responding to false rumors about Obama's personal background and tax policies.

In fundraising, Obama followed in the footsteps of Howard Dean's 2004 bid by regularly soliciting small donations from a wide swath of voters, raising record amounts online by federal filing deadlines. He then used this money for more traditional campaigning — for example, flooding cable markets in strategic states with television advertising. Obama spent a record-shattering $293 million on TV ads between January 1, 2007, and October 29, 2008, according to TNS Media Intelligence. McCain spent $132 million during the same period.

In many ways, the story of Obama's campaign was the story of his supporters, whose creativity and enthusiasm manifested through multitudes of websites and YouTube videos online. It even resulted in volunteer contributions like the innovative Obama '08 iPhone and iTouch application that enabled owners to mobilize their friends and contacts in battleground states through the Apple devices.

Not wanting to take anything away from Mr Obama's Victory 2.0, but I do think there were some things going on that were not just Internet / Social media driven, and more part of bigger things - he was paddling down the flow of river of time, the Zeitgeist wanted a change.

Firstly, the Crunch helped hugely - Mr Obama's stock in the prediction markets rocketed after that (see graph here)

Secondly, I suspect that the events of the last few years ( 2 wars for starters ) created an environment where these techniques spread his message more easily.

Thirdly, I'm not certain re Umair's point re finance asymmetry. Obama outspent McCain by a significant amount - $640m to $340m - I'd argue that a big driver of his victory was being able to liberate more money, as the Wired article notes.

In fact, that is the biggest takeaway to me from Umair's and Wired's analysis - if you can build a system that can take in $2 for your opponents every $1, AND you can surf the Zeitgeist, the rest will probably slip into place fairly nicely.

Anyway, he will need all the politics 2.0 capability going forward, because he inherits a very, very tough task. He needs to be FDR, JFK and MLK rolled into one. And I hope all those people who put him in stay with him in the worst times to come, their support is needed not just for election.