Database Mining: The New Ward Heeler

The Republican Party has led in database development for the last 20 years, mostly with the work of former direct mailer Richard Viguerie, with his Moral Majority and Reagan contacts. I remember reading about it in industry journals at the time.

What Obama's campaign has done is made this kind of database scientific. There is no contact that is not followed up on through any of the following means: text message, email, phone, facebook, or twitter. This has been the Democrat's strategic advantage since he entered the race. The way his campaign has stayed on top of technology throughout has been impressive.

When everything is said and done after this campaign, everyone will point out the massive GOTV effort by the Democrats will have provided the edge. But this edge, of people walking their states, would not have been possible without the social networking and database contacts.

I probably received, in the last 2 months, 8 entreaties to phone bank or canvass in battleground states near me EVERY DAY. I had to look to do this in 2004.

Brave New World on November 4th?

The time is finally upon us. After nearly two years of campaigning we are about to elect a new president. This election has kept me so wrapped up in all the technology that I have not even had a chance to add my voice to it. Here are some of the amazing technologies that will forever be useful in future  campaigns:

• Social Media Networking
• Regression modeling of Polls
• Get Out The Vote (GOTV) database mining
• Voting Machine Fraud Blogging
• Trash Emailing
• YouTube Moments
• Mobile Contact

While some of these items are completely non-partisan in nature and merely helped to inform us of campaign status (Poll regression modeling, Voting Machine Fraud blogging), the others were utilized to better advantage in getting out the message for the candidates. Who won this battle? Let's take a closer look.

Social Media Networking

The Obama campaign was on FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn before any of the other candidates during the long primary. I was not on the Obama bandwagon early, but I was impressed that I was being contacted in these areas long before anyone else. Any of us on FaceBook saw how many people were joining the Obama groups steadily over the course of the last two years. How many Obama buttons, Obama Lightsabers, etc. have we received during this time--too many to count?

On LinkedIn, Senator Obama asked my advice on topics facing his campaign and topics facing the country. I didn't fall for it: I knew he didn't send this personally nor do I think he read all of the comments. But I did send in my response when I thought I had something to say about a topic, and I received an automated response--that's better than when I was looking for a job and I would almost never get even the most cursory of automated responses ("Thank you for your interest, we will be contacting you if your resume meets our requirements.").

Between all of these social media items, this might constitute, as Mary Butler Twittered in my feed, his new communications channel after he's elected (IF he's elected). An unfiltered feed to the huge network he's built up and one that can get his message about his agenda out before the Limbaughs and Hannities of the world can lie about.

Are we witnessing the beginning of a whole new way of communicating in the Internet age between our government and the electorate?

Networking, Networking, and, uh, Networking...

As I attended various discussions at the NTEN Conference (08NTC) today, Networking seemed to be the word of the day:

• Networking as in the standard way an IT geek uses it, which is the Local Area Network or Wide Area Network. This is important because for networking to be done in other ways, a good solid network infrastructure needs to be used in an organization. This will become more apparent as the the other type of "networking" starts to be used...


• Networking as in Social Networking, or as the more geek-inclined among us call it, Interactive Web or Web 2.0. Web 2.0 requires that an organization that attempts to use this type of technology in fundraising and outreach needs to be very secure, with a solid network architecture that can handle both the bandwidth requirements (internal AND external) and the real-time communication and collaboration requirements.


• Networking, as in meeting your colleagues from around the country and listening to what they're doing and how they might be resolving the same issues that you might have. This is always the best way to hear about what others are doing and discovering what works for them and allowing you to think about how it might work for your Social Profit organization.

I have also been working on how best to utilize Web 2.0 at GMHC for the last year. One thing that I've noticed from my research is that an agency really needs to examine it's mission and core values to determine how or whether to use this technology. My mantra in IT (and in all enterprise processes for that matter) is "how does this forward the mission?" If the answer is positive, then the next question is "how can this be implemented with best practices for the most impact and greatest value to the organization?" It is at this point that the team that will implement the process convenes and produces the project.

By the way, I want to compliment the NTEN team for their innovative use of just such Interactive Web technologies. This blog post, via the tag, is being collected with a number of other blog posts on the event using technorati. Also, although I did get sick of the constant "tweats" on my cell phone, their use of Twitter has been a great success and a wonderful idea. This is a technology to reckon with in the future, as you may have seen it just earlier today being used successfully to gather war protesters in real-time.