It worked for him….
Question: What has Barack Obama got that most journalists don’t?
Answer: A job.
Obama and his team understood how to use the web to build a massive online ‘affinity group’ to both raise money and get out the vote.
It was a remarkable achievement. He came from nowhere, beat the formidable Hillary Clinton machine and took both the nomination and the election, raising an astonishing $750 million, most of it from small contributors and much of it online.
He understood the web, in the same way that JFK understood television or FDR understood radio.
Now, here’s the peculiar part of all this.
The very media who were covering his rise, newspapers and television, are now at death’s door, and it is the Obama trick of using the web that could save them, if they can embrace it.
What Obama did was to build an online affinity group. The web is particularly good at this kind of thing. It’s a community. Facebook with a purpose. In this case, the purpose and the nexus of the affinity group was Obama.
But that is interchangeable.
Instead of building an online affinity group around Obama, why not use the web to build an online affinity group around The San Francisco Chronicle… or Anthony Bourdain on The Travel Channel?
It’s the same thing, and even easier, as you don’t need your group to hit the “Contribute Now’ button. All they have to do is ‘get involved’.
The tools to do this are all before us, and with the addition of Twitter, even more potent and powerful than they were before.
But TV and Newspapers to date don’t do this.
They are still the products of an old way of thinking about the media and how it works. This is the school that says, ‘we put out the news (or TV show) you watch it.. or don’t’. We might call this the ‘Take it or Leave It’ school of marketing. Here’s our product- take it or leave it.
This is kind of how Eisenhower ran for the Presidency in 1952. Here’s Ike. Take him or don’t.
Oh, they ran commercials for Eisenhower. His was the first Presidential campaign to run TV spots in fact, (which much upset the General, but got him elected). But that was 50 years ago. Ironically, while the selling of the President has gotten much more sophisticated, the selling of the newspaper or the TV show is still very much in the Eisenhower Administration.
Sides of buses, 30-second spots on TV (tune in tonight!).
Crazy.
The affinity group is out there. They WANT to be part of a community. They WANT to be part of something bigger.
But in the world of the web, the TV shows and Newspapers have to push…. all the time. Push.
Remember how the Obama team let us in early (get the ‘us’ part here) by text message as to who his choice for VP was going to be?
When was the last time you got a personal text message from Nick Kristoff at The New York Times telling you to be sure and read his column today? When was the last time you got a text message from Tony Bourdain telling you what a wild time he was having shooting the show in Rome?
I did get an email from Hillary’s mother last month asking me to contribute to some fund to help her daughter pay off her campaign debt.
If Hillary Clinton’s mother is hip enough to email me a personal note (which does not cost her a dime), surely Tony Bourdain is hip enough to do that as well. And he doesn’t even want my money – just an hour of my time.
