Obama’s twittering
6th July 2011
Today President Obama executed a persuasion play involving Web 2.0 social media and an end run around the traditional elite media. He ran a mass mediated persuasion event in the East Room of the White House that was little more than a one hour commercial for his 2012 re-election effort. Consider that he had a roomful of handpicked and adoring citizens (that 25-35 aspirational clan of Internet savvy young adults), the co-founder of twitter, Jack Dorsey, sitting stiffly in his chair reading twitter questions screened by a hand picked team of curators and displayed on a large plasma screen, and no one to harry, hector, or harass him during or after his untimed, uncontrolled, and unending responses. It doesn’t get much better than that and you know that Richard Nixon, Jack Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, and Harry Truman are rolling over in their graves at the sight of Obama shooting fish in a barrel.
Yet the event was a serious failure for Team Obama in the run to election in 2012.
First, this event did not target, address, or hit key swing voters that hold Obama’s future in their hands. Obama played largely to an adoring audience of glowing graduate students who will do anything and everything to help Obama, including tweet during this event to all their similar friends. Obama won the election in his own locker room with this persuasion play. And, judging by the silence in the room after the first ten minutes, Obama put them all to sleep. Sure, most of them were live twittering from the East Room, but then they were doing that in the lecture hall with their professors which tells you much about them, their professors, and Mr. Obama.
Second, twitter and most Web 2.0 platforms are seriously compromised as neutral parties in the election. Consider these two paragraphs.
Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder, is leaving open the idea of trying something like this again. On his Twitter account, he called the event a “great first step for future Town Halls,” and he asked his nearly 1.7 million followers for advice: “How can we make Twitter @TownHalls better in the future?”
Now, this.
First, yes it (PB Note: “it” is twitter) is worth $7 billion and perhaps exponentially more. Seriously. If Facebook, which is awful and will end up being only a digital singles bar where divorcees find the person they should’ve gone to prom with, is worth $90 billion then Twitter should be worth closer to $20 billion than 10. In fact I could construct a scenario extrapolating current usage trends and social impact whereby Twitter’s value ultimately exceeds Facebook’s.
Jack Dorsey sat next to President Obama for approximately one hour and asked questions that were pitches taken from the Chicago Softball Beer League then allowed Mr. Obama more mulligans, do-overs, and let me rephrase that chances than a parent in a Pee Wee T-Ball League game. He clearly would not do anything that affects the financial future of twitter. I suspect that Dorsey and his crew are developing these town hall wet kiss events for Republicans too given Obama’s perilous chances for 2012. No reason to offend the team that may well run the East Room of the White House in January 2013, is there?
Third, Obama broke no new ground with Web 2.0. Whatever power social media hold for politics, Obama chose not to deploy it in this event. He just brought a computer and a big screen to a cozy, cherry-picked townhall PR stunt. He did not come close to using twitter the way it works in a rapid exchange of 140 character messages through the Internet. No one tweets out a 10 minute oral response in 140 character bursts, yet that’s how Obama wants the world to know how he tweets. And, while we’re on it, how was this technology any different than 1980? People could have sent a fax to a phone number and then let Fax Curators pick the groovy winners. Jack Dorsey regularly pointed out the time dated freshness of the tweeted questions noting that this one had come in since the event began and that one arrived just a few minutes ago using a time frame that again broadcast TV with fax lines could have matched.
Fourth, look over the list of curators who culled the thousands of tweets for the dozen or so that made it on that large screen in front of Jack Dorsey. A college student newspaper kid. A couple from North Carolina. JV journalists in outlets one would traditionally think of as small town Fox News turf except they are on the progressive side of the tracks in those towns. One who blogs for the Economist, while dabbling in cartooning, short fiction, and political theory. And, what the hell is a curator anyway? Is that the New Journalism for editor?
I rate this as a major persuasion disappointment. Obama held all the cards in this game and yet the only play he could make was to lecture endlessly with nuance and without relief on any and every point. Good grief, the town hall began with Obama tweeting a question to himself that he then answered in something considerably longer than a 140 character answer. At least he held off including tweets from his wife or children or even his Vice President. Maybe we’ll get that when he realizes just how much trouble he is in. (Jeepers, do you remember 1980 and Jimmy Carter quoting his conversations with child-daughter Amy about nuclear war while getting stomped in debate by Ronald Reagan?)
A President gave one hour of face time for this stunt and got what? Since he did this in the White House, he could not directly engage in fund raising. Sure, he might get some peripheral money from this event, but imagine if instead he had walked across the street to the Hay-Adams Hotel in a private room with 20 fat cat donors.
Of course, he didn’t do this event to fund raise or even run for re-election. He did this to affect legislation in Congress on the debt ceiling limit, and taxes, and budget cuts. Yeah, he did it to put pressure on those damn greed head Republican obstructionists and baby, did he stick it to ‘em! The twitterati are out in force right now, leaning on their Representatives and Senators, putting the arm on ‘em, telling ‘em what’s what. And, all those 20something iGizmo kids who were in the room are having drinks and dinner with Representative Engulf and Senator Devour. Do you believe that?
Got one more way to illustrate this persuasion failure.
Imagine Bill Clinton running the room.
Go with that counterfactual for a moment. Imagine Bill Clinton in the East Room with a crowd of hand picked swing and independent voters making his re-election run with the new media and twitter. Just to jog your memory, here’s a shot of Mr. Clinton in 1992 handling the twitter of its time, the Arsenio Hall show.
How about Mr. Clinton on the Facebook of then, MTV? Boxers or briefs?
Clinton would have actually maintained a running twitter session with everyone on the Internet while engaging tweets from the audience, and moving through the room and talking with everyone. He would have burned down that room and the Web. And, you know it.
Mr. Obama designed a home run persuasion event then hit a Pee Wee league shot heard round the world 2.0.
Yeah. twitter is worth $7 billion.
Yeah. Obama is going to get re-elected in a landslide.
Yeah. Remember, It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid. Don’t persuade yourself.