A mercifully abridged version of my contribution to Highbury Labour on Wednesday night. Members were enthusiastic to learn more so I thought it would be useful to provide a recap with some links:

O – Social media is ordinary not extraordinary

Both campaigns followed a pretty similar public-facing approach. Social media is mainstream not a +1. There were a few new stunts – Obama’s Ask Me Anything caught the eye. But whereas the last campaign was notable for social media being a public positioning tool, now it’s just another media to incorporate.

B – Our best rivals their best

The big news from the Obama campaign was the launch of Dashboard. It’s brilliant, it really is. It allows activists to make calls to voters from the app. And record the conversation. Decentralised phone banking. It lists campaign sessions and key talking points. Or MembersNet as we’ve been calling it for years. Obama’s campaign benefitted from having the infrastructure of the last election in place. Labour has had its infrastructure in place for years – sometimes the same people putting their hands up for the same tasks for 30+ years.

A – Amazing content triumphs

You can have a great strategy and the best implementation. But content remains critical. My favourite examples from the campaign? The ‘this seat’s taken‘ tweet was a masterpiece of rapid rebuttal. The polling day page was wonderfully simple.

M – Micro-targetting is big and will get bigger

The ability to predict the likelihood of someone voting, and who they will vote for has won elections before. But the most innovative private sector segmentation and targetting is now in politics and it’s here to stay.  In an era of tight resources, focussing them in the right place to achieve the optimum impact is very important. It could be mis-used (to tell different people different things) but that’s not a sustainable strategy. Entering a conversation with a voter about something relevant to them is very obvious but still do very infrequently in the UK.

A – Analysis beats tradition

The Obama campaign is consistently good at trying something and stopping it if it doesn’t work. In the UK we aren’t. We print 10,000 leaflets, deliver them and print 10,000 more. With the economies of scale of printing now changed for good, why aren’t we more experimental? Why continue to treat volunteers as fodder rather than protecting and valuing their time as highly as possible?

Further reading:

• This article from the Economist on the cyber war is a good summary
• And this on the ground war

For more in-depth study:

The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns
Sasha Issenberg

Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation: How We Make Up Our Minds Without Using Our Heads
Drew Weston

And for useful training on community organising:

Movement for Change

I’m contributing to an Islington Labour Party meeting tonight so have been thinking about what lessons we will see from the Obama campaign adopted in the UK by the next general election. I’m aware that I am not alone in this, and do not have a unique perspective so would be grateful to be challenge on any of the below:

In 2008, Obama’s adoption of social media was widely considered to have a significant impact on his campaign. His enthusiastic adoption of Facebook and YouTube and the campaign’s use of Twitter reinforced his image as a new President for a new era. Perhaps more notable was his ability to raise millions of dollars in small donations, primarily through the use of email.

His re-election campaign moved with the times. Online giving was made slightly easier. He used Tumblr and Google+, not available in 2008. His campaign created some beautiful boards on Pinterest. And in one of the more memorable moments of the digital campaign, he tweeted a picture of his occupied chair in the Oval Office – helping position Clint Eastwood’s contribution to the Republican Convention as madness and obscuring his opponent’s message. If in 2008 Obama campaigned in poetry, perhaps the 2012 campaign was notable for its pictures.

When leading Labour activists visited the Clinton campaign in 1996 it took months for their findings to seep out into the ether. This time around, leading British activists like Mark Pack are already using powerful imagery to create virtual campaign posters based on short-term topical issues – just like the Obama campaign. And social media is the driver for this rapid discovery and adoption of successful US techniques.

Social media was integral to the air war between the candidates. So much so, that mostly it went unnoticed. There were the occasional stunts – such as Obama taking part in an Ask Me Anything on Reddit, but mostly social media was rightly seen as a central campaigning tool – not an afterthought. Both campaigns were pretty similar in their approach.

But the big news of 2012 was not the air war but the ground war. Obama built on his web-based organising tools of 2008 and extended them significantly. At the last election it was ground-breaking to be able to tap in your postcode and discover your local campaign event. I did just that when I visited Spokane, WA during the 2007 primaries).  In 2012, Dashboard enabled activists to access individual voter records and canvas them from the comfort of their home.

Here there are fewer lessons for British politics. Both main parties have had these services for some time. Labour’s (often-derided) MembersNet has allowed activists to view local campaign activity and phone voters long before the Obama’s  Dashboard was launched. The strength and consistency of the party machines means they have much more of the infrastructure in place to deliver the nuts and bolts of campaigns than US Presidential candidates.

However, hidden in the ground war was the most sophisticated voter segmentation effort ever. Both campaigns drew data from electoral registration, consumer databases, shopping habits, Facebook and even used cookies to identify the issues that were of most interest and the micro-segments of the election that could help push them over the line. This largely unnoticed effort actually flies in the face of Obama’s criticism of such tactics. But it has enabled the campaigns to focus on the most likely voters, pitching to them in the most relevant fashion. It mirrors the behaviour of large corporates from Tesco to Target.

Trufflenet has long believed that understanding an audience is critical to successful campaigning. Researching audiences rather than topics enables organisations to develop deep insights into what makes people tick online: what do they read and share, what advertising crosses their radar, what policy areas are of interest. Quantitative data on someone’s shopping habits may help you identify their wealth, family status or leisure activities. But qualitative understanding of their opinions gives a far richer layer of insight. Combining quantitative and qualitative ‘big data’ and using it to influence tactics and personalised campaigns is the future.

There’s significant scope for learning here in British politics. The task is subtly different: the UK has higher voter registration but lower turnout. When registering to vote in many states, US citizens reveal their party allegiance. But in my experience, much of British voter ID is based on targeting large areas which have voted for the party in local elections and knocking on doors regardless of propensity to vote. With limited activists and money, the more and earlier a British parliamentary campaign can focus on the few swing voters, the more effective it will be.

In the coming months, litres of ink will be spilt analysing the campaigns. Whilst the public move on, the politicos will dissect the campaign for every last lesson and we can expect to see the results long before 2015.