{"id":16237,"date":"2013-07-31T05:45:58","date_gmt":"2013-07-31T09:45:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=16237"},"modified":"2013-07-30T20:34:39","modified_gmt":"2013-07-31T00:34:39","slug":"how-the-democrats-used-facebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2013\/07\/how-the-democrats-used-facebook\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Democrats used FaceBook"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

The Washington Post is publishing excerpts from its reporter Dan Balz\u2019s book on the last presidential election: Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America<\/a>\"\".\u00a0 Monday\u2019s installment was about how the Democrats\u2019 sophisticated use of technology to target their message and get out the vote.\u00a0 After the jump, an account of what the Democrats did with FaceBook.<\/p>\n

From Dan Balz, How the Obama campaign won the race for voter data \u2013 The Washington Post<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Early in 2011, some Obama operatives visited Facebook, where executives were encouraging them to spend some of the campaign\u2019s advertising money with the company. \u201cWe started saying, \u2018Okay, that\u2019s nice if we just advertise,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Messina said. \u201cBut what if we could build a piece of software that tracked all this and allowed you to match your friends on Facebook with our lists, and we said to you, \u2018Okay, so-and-so is a friend of yours, we think he\u2019s unregistered, why don\u2019t you go get him to register?\u2019 Or \u2018So-and-so is a friend of yours, we think he\u2019s undecided. Why don\u2019t you get him to be decided?\u2019 And we only gave you a discrete number of friends. That turned out to be millions of dollars and a year of our lives. It was incredibly complex to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

But this third piece of the puzzle provided the campaign with another treasure trove of information and an organizing tool unlike anything available in the past. It took months and months to solve, but it was a huge breakthrough. If a person signed on to Dashboard through his or her Facebook account, the campaign could, with permission, gain access to that person\u2019s Facebook friends. The Obama team called this \u201ctargeted sharing.\u201d It knew from other research that people who pay less attention to politics are more likely to listen to a message from a friend than from someone in the campaign. The team could supply people with information about their friends based on data it had independently gathered. The campaign knew who was and who wasn\u2019t registered to vote. It knew who had a low propensity to vote. It knew who was solid for Obama and who needed more persuasion \u2014 and a gentle or not-so-gentle nudge to vote. Instead of asking someone to send a message to all of his or her Facebook friends, the campaign could present a handpicked list of the three or four or five people it believed would most benefit from personal encouragement.<\/p>\n

Digital director Teddy Goff told my colleague Aaron Blake, \u201cFor people who allowed us, we were able to say to them: \u2018All right, you just watched a video about registering to vote. Don\u2019t just share it with all your friends on Facebook. We\u2019ve run a match, and here are your 10 friends on Facebook who we think may not be registered to vote and live in Ohio, Colorado, Virginia, Florida.\u2019\u2009\u201d This was especially helpful in trying to reach voters under age 30. On Obama\u2019s target lists, the voter file contained no good contact information for half of those young voters \u2014 they didn\u2019t have land lines, and no other information was available. But Goff said 85\u00a0percent of that group were on Facebook and could be reached by a friend of a friend. Reed described another example. Someone interested in health care might click on an ad on Facebook, and up would pop an infographic about health care. At the end of it would be a \u201cshare\u201d button, and if the person clicked on it, names of friends the person could share the information with would appear. The campaign knew from its own database which of those friends were most likely to respond to information about health care. \u201cWe went through and we looked at all those friends and found the ones that were the best matches for that specific piece of content,\u201d Reed said.<\/p>\n

Google\u2019s Eric Schmidt, who offered advice to the campaign, said: \u201cIf you don\u2019t know anything about campaigns you would assume it\u2019s national, but a successful campaign is highly, highly local, down to the Zip code. The revolution in technology is to understand where the undecideds are in this district and how you reach them.\u201d That was what the integration of technology and old-fashioned organizing was designed to do for Obama in 2012.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Now the Republicans have started an initiative<\/a>\u2013based in Silicon Valley, no less\u2013to close the information technology gap.<\/p>\n

Is all of this good or bad for our democracy?\u00a0 Does it bother you that the politicians already know so much about you?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Washington Post is publishing excerpts from its reporter Dan Balz\u2019s book on the last presidential election: Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America.\u00a0 Monday\u2019s installment was about how the Democrats\u2019 sophisticated use of technology to target their message and get out the vote.\u00a0 After the jump, an account of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,36,44],"tags":[65,656,801,1088,2039],"class_list":["post-16237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-politics","category-technology","tag-2012-presidential-election","tag-democratic-party","tag-facebook","tag-information-technology","tag-social-media"],"yoast_head":"\nHow the Democrats used FaceBook<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Washington Post is 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