Dennis Peterson
Member
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2007
- Messages
- 47
On Tuesday, Obama dominated the independent vote. He also raised $32 million in January, mostly from small individual contributions, and he's gotten over $5 million since Tuesday. How?
Read these two links:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/obama_and_paul_the_kings_of_the_web_election.php
http://techpresident.com/blog/entry/21119/is_the_obama_campaign_a_model_for_online_politics
There are commercially-available databases, built up from data on magazine subscriptions, warranty cards, supermarket purchases, etc etc. They break populations into demographic and cultural groups. From there, they can predict peoples' attitudes, based on their group.
The Obama campaign bought the databases and used them for targeted marketing. They had tailored messages for different groups. Depending on their data, they would phone, or send mail, or send someone knocking. For their supporter database, they knew who was strong, who was weak, and they followed up.
By contrast, what did we have? My meetup got a walking list from the campaign, which was just Republican voters. Free public information. They gave us a neighborhood to walk that basically wasn't walkable - it was a bit rural, houses were far apart, dogs were running loose everywhere. And a lot of these people were diehard Bush supporters. How many independents and former democrats do we have in our ranks?
After that, we picked our own neighborhoods. We picked dense upscale areas that had friendly people. But now we had no information at all. We didn't even know who was a registered voter...but we still got better results than that first time.
The national campaign should have bought those databases, hired pollsters to see which groups we would do well in, and given us lists with scripts targeted to those people. They said they didn't know what to do with all that money...well, that's what the pros do with it.
If they couldn't, we should have formed PACs capable of handling it...I don't know what the data costs, but it would have been a better use of money than projects like the blimp. I loved the blimp, I saw it in Myrtle Beach and it was downright imposing, but I don't think it really got the job done. It was an illusion of power. In a campaign, information is the real thing.
Read these two links:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/obama_and_paul_the_kings_of_the_web_election.php
http://techpresident.com/blog/entry/21119/is_the_obama_campaign_a_model_for_online_politics
There are commercially-available databases, built up from data on magazine subscriptions, warranty cards, supermarket purchases, etc etc. They break populations into demographic and cultural groups. From there, they can predict peoples' attitudes, based on their group.
The Obama campaign bought the databases and used them for targeted marketing. They had tailored messages for different groups. Depending on their data, they would phone, or send mail, or send someone knocking. For their supporter database, they knew who was strong, who was weak, and they followed up.
By contrast, what did we have? My meetup got a walking list from the campaign, which was just Republican voters. Free public information. They gave us a neighborhood to walk that basically wasn't walkable - it was a bit rural, houses were far apart, dogs were running loose everywhere. And a lot of these people were diehard Bush supporters. How many independents and former democrats do we have in our ranks?
After that, we picked our own neighborhoods. We picked dense upscale areas that had friendly people. But now we had no information at all. We didn't even know who was a registered voter...but we still got better results than that first time.
The national campaign should have bought those databases, hired pollsters to see which groups we would do well in, and given us lists with scripts targeted to those people. They said they didn't know what to do with all that money...well, that's what the pros do with it.
If they couldn't, we should have formed PACs capable of handling it...I don't know what the data costs, but it would have been a better use of money than projects like the blimp. I loved the blimp, I saw it in Myrtle Beach and it was downright imposing, but I don't think it really got the job done. It was an illusion of power. In a campaign, information is the real thing.
