You know how marketers are always looking to collect email addresses from their loyal customers, in order to communicate with them in some more personal, relevant way – and get them to buy more stuff? I was recently reading a post-mortem on the digital aspects of President Obama's presidential campaign, and was dumbfounded to discover that there are over 13 million people on his email list. (Additionally, he collected over 5 million "friends" across 15 social networking sites – including 3 million on Facebook alone – and more than 3 million mobile phone numbers in response to the campaign's text messaging program.)13 million email addresses.
What do you do with all that connectivity? How do you harness those digital masses that, having sworn their allegiance, await the activation bat-signal?
The group Organizing for America, which is overseen by the Democratic National Committee, put that email list to work last week. David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager and the man credited with its brilliant use of digital channels, wrote in a March 13 message to The List: "In the next few weeks we'll be asking you to do some of the same things we asked of you during the campaign." Namely, to mobilize within their communities on behalf of the president's agenda.
We saw what that fan club did to power Obama to the presidency. It will be fascinating to see what they can do when pointed at such complex and polarizing policy issues as the budget, the bailout or the deficit. Are we a nation who responds better to paternalistic distribution of our national policy – or to peer pressure? Another example of participatory government at its most interesting. (Note: I had to edit this, like, a hundred times to get most the words starting with "p" out of the last paragraph. Another example of alliteration at its most coincidental.)
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