Obama Media Guru in Dublin
February 27, 2009 – 6:49 pmI attended the Joe Rospars (Digital Media Manager – Obama Presidential Campaign) guest talk on Wednesday night in the Camden Court Hotel having found out about it that morning. Unfortunately I had to cancel my attendance at an IIA event that evening but felt that there wouldn’t be many opportunities to hear first hand about the social media strategy behind the Obama Presidential campaign. On arriving early I sought out the event organiser from Strawberry Media to find out how it had all come about. I was aware that there would be some Fianna Fail party members in attendance because of the topic but I was very surprised to learn that Joe Rospars was in Dublin because his company, Blue State Digital, had been working with Fianna Fail on the redevelopment of their website and consulting on their social media strategy. What transpired was interesting to say the least.
The event, attended I think in equal numbers by bloggers and Fianna Fail party members, kicked off with a quick introduction by Sean Dorgan, Fianna Fail General Secretary. Standing in front of a screenshot of the new Fianna Fail website he announced that Fianna Fail, Strawberry Media and Blue State Digital had been working for the past month on a new website. I think at this point the penny dropped for the blogging community that they were in fact attending a Fianna Fail event. Mr. Dorgan said they were “investing in utilising web to communicate more effectively with their 65,000 members, 3,000 branches and many supporters”. He continued that they would “add and innovate” going forward”.
He handed over to Joe Rospars for a 10 minute presentation and a Q&A session. The presentation was kicked off with an Obama campaign video which was played at the Democratic Convention and many rallies during the presidential race. A couple of stats were highlighted about the digital campaign – the main ones being that 13 million supporters where recruited online and $500 million was donated online. This was followed by an explanation of how they did this:
1. Build Real Relationships – through email, video and social networks
2. Put People to Work – through offices in 20 States and by providing tools to allow supporters to get involved and organise events online from home.
The presentation was interesting but it didn’t go into a lot of detail and I would loved to have learned more than I already knew – it left me a little cold. The Q&A followed with questions from Fianna Fail people and bloggers alike but I felt that some questions were left unanswered by Joe Rospars. I got the impression that he does not have enough local knowledge to transfer a campaign of this nature to Ireland. The numbers don’t add up – our demographics for active online users is way below the US and our electoral process is just, well, very very different. In fact my husband asked how effective one-to-one online conversations would be in Ireland when we are so unique in that many of our voters know our politicians and councillors already on a one to one basis. He didn’t answer the question except to say it would be a challenge.
Joe Rospars spoke a lot about transparency and authenticity of voice and I think this is the main thing that any political party should take from the Obama campaign. As I have said the numbers mightn’t add up but all parties should be communicating and engaging in conversations with voters through all channels including social media and most importantly they have to be transparent and truthful.
In light of the fact that many bloggers attended the event unaware that it was organised by Fianna Fail and many felt duped into attending it seems the Party have started their online strategy with very little transparency. Its blown up in their face over the past two days with the blogging and twitter community angry and has received coverage in traditional media. Many feel that this web project should have been given to an Irish company, and there are plenty with the expertise to deliver it. Apparently its unpatriotic to go shopping in the North but so is handing over a project like this to a US company when the economy is crisis and many people are loosing their jobs. Where is the support for Irish SMEs?
The blunder of how the event was organised may not have been intentional. The strategy of inviting the blogging community must have been picked up from one of their many meetings with Blue State Digital but everyone must have been snoozing when Joe talked about transparency, transparency, transparency!
Tags: blogging, digital media, social media