Archive: Author: The Management

About an hour ago I got an email from David Axelrod, senior adviser to the Obama 2012 campaign. The title: "What Barak Said About Barack." The email is a great example of narrowcasting. If you're Jewish, you probably know how Barak (Ehud, the former Labor Prime Minister of Israel) is. If not, well, you probably didn't get the email. Why would the Obama campaign be sending out a Friday afternoon (don't they know it's almost Shabbos?) email about Israel? I don't know, but I presume they're either worried about Obama's standing with his Jewish supporters and/or concerned about the escalating tensions in the Middle East and the coming clash in the United Nations over Palestinian statehood. In either event, the e-mail reads...

Add Israel to the growing list of countries (Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Spain, Italy, England...

It was big "news" on Friday in social media circles: "Obama Loses 36,000+ Followers in #Compromise Campaign," Mashable headlined it. Fox News, The Daily News, The New York Post and plenty of other media outlets repeated the story, all repeating the claim that a one-third of one-percent drop in Obama's 9.4 million Twitter following was a big deal. So, how about a headline for today: Obama is up 37,000 followers on Twitter since that dip on Friday. Surely this must mean something, but what, oh-great-social-media-gurus? The truth is, neither the dip nor the rise in Obama's daily Twitter count should be taken as meaning much of anything. Like most Twitter celebrities, the @barackobama account is a hollow signifier. Millions of people...

"One of the best-kept secrets in American politics is that the two-party system has long been brain dead -- kept alive by support systems like state electoral laws that protect the established parties from rivals and by Federal subsidies and so-called campaign reform. The two-party system would collapse in an instant if the tubes were pulled and the IVs were cut." --Cornell University professor Theodore Lowi, former president of the American Political Science Association, writing in the New York Times Magazine, August 23, 1992. "With little more than a year before the 2012 presidential election season kicks off, time is short for the American people to become aware of the political forces in play." ...

Ever since John McCain's upset win of the New Hampshire presidential primary in February 2000, when during his live televised victory speech he mentioned his McCain2000.com website, unleashing a flood of online donations--more than $1 million in 48 hours and more than $2 million in one week--political campaigns and the journalists who cover them have been entranced by the relationship between the Internet and grassroots politics. This made sense in McCain's case: nearly one half of the people who donated to him in that dizzying week were first-time donors to the campaign, and according to Becky Donatelli, one of McCain's strategists, their gifts averaged under $100. "The deluge was so large that our servers could not handle the load and...

Joe Rospars, chief digital strategist for Obama 2012 (and the wunderkind who masterminded the campaign's 2008 new media operation), has a post up on the Obama for America blog that appears to respond to the questions I raised this morning about the grassrootsiness of the campaign's stunning $86 million second quarter fundraising haul. He writes: Folks have been asking lots of follow-up questions about the numbers, and there will be more than 15,000 pages of detail when we file our report on Friday with the answers (unlike many of the outside special-interest groups attacking President Obama, who don't disclose anything at all). But we've been able to do a little digging and math today to pull a few other interesting facts beyond...

In Los Angeles, a half-dozen PdFers gathered at Lucy's El Adobe. In Brussels, thirty folks met at the offices of Fleishman-Hillard, a PR firm. In Rome, it looks like the most stylish of affairs (see photo below; we are not surprised). In New York, we met at New Work City 2.0, a PdF-style place for sure. In Frankfurt, New York, Baltimore, Milan, even Sydney, Australia, we got together and talked about our common passion for how the internet is changing politics, government and civil society. Joe Anthony, a former Obama campaign activist (whose travails with the 2008 campaign we covered closely), attended the LA Meetup and reported: It was great to get a small group of like-minded folks together and we...

Obama campaign manager Jim Messina has announced that Obama 2012 has raised a whopping $86 million in the second quarter of this year, shattering George W. Bush's prior record of $50 million in a quarter, and way ahead of Obama's fundraising pace four years ago. The official report will be filed with the FEC this Friday, but Messina continued the campaign's tradition of reporting "first" to its grassroots email list via YouTube video. The numbers are impressive, but there's a catch. Messina emphasizes the grass-roots base of Obama 2012 in the video, rattling off statistic after statistic: 31,000 face-to-face meetings conducted by organizers; 290,000 conversations; 650 local organizing meetings; 60 field offices set up across the country. These are impressive numbers,...

If you're curious, as we are, about where Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen are going with their Google Ideas think/do-tank, check out this recent profile from the Financial Times. Pegged to a June 26-29 conference in Ireland that Google Ideas convened called the "Summit Against Violent Extremism," (SAVE) the FT report captures both the exuberant ambition of the nascent project and some confusion as well. Unlike Google.org, which is the search giant's philanthropic arm, Google Ideas is part of the company's business operations and strategy division. Its staff of six are based here in New York. Cohen, who is best known for his time at the State Department, when he asked Twitter to delay a planned maintenance shutdown to not hinder...

There's more evidence of smartphone usage in the United States enabling a kind of "leapfrog effect" over the digital divide. According to a new report by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American LIfe Project, 44 percent of African Americans and Hispanics say they own a smartphone, compared to just 30 percent of non-Hispanic whites. That said, class and education levels are also strongly related to smartphone ownership, with just 22% of people making less than $30K/yr saying they own one, compared to about 40% of people between $30K-$75K, and nearly 60 percent of people making more than $75K. The younger you are, though, the more likely you use a smartphone--even among people making less than $30K a year, 39%...