Obama’s Wired Campaign: Lessons for Public Health Communication

This article reviews and analyses the use of new media by the United States presidential campaign of Barack Obama in 2008. New media are defined as "media that are based on the use of digital technologies such as the Internet, digital video, and mobile devices." (Footnotes have been removed by the editor.) These technologies were used to gain and mobilise supporters "in ways that were unprecedented and untested in political campaigns" and may have implications for creating public health campaign strategies using new media.

The authors group new media applications into those related to the following:

1. Obama campaign website - The website contained links to the candidate’s position on issues, a biography, a place for donations, and applications that emphasised community involvement and organising. This password-protected section allowed people interested in joining of the campaign to register and then join a private community of supporters where they could communicate with fellow supporters, plan events using event-planning tools, fundraise with goal-setting tools, and blog about their feelings, both positive and negative, about the candidate and the campaign. (There were 1.5 million registered web volunteers.)
   
2. Obama campaign TV channel - Videos were featured on the campaign’s BarackTV website, linked to the campaign’s YouTube site, and included clips for special interest groups. They emphasised stories of campaign volunteers and supporters, as well as the candidate. The article notes that there were 5 times more Obama campaign clips on these sites than
   on Republican party challenger John McCain's website, and they had been viewed over 18 million times by November 3 2008.
   
3. Social network sites - Both candidates used social network sites such as Facebook and MySpace, "but the Obama campaign set up their sites earlier and went further by also creating profiles on more targeted social network sites such as AsianAve.com, MiGente.com, and BlackPlanet.com", resulting in up to 4 times the "friend" connections on Facebook and MySpace.
   
4. Mobile phones - Text messages sent to campaign supporters included regular updates on the campaign and were "geodemographically" marketed by location and further differentiated by "swing" versus solidly Democratic states. Messages also rewarded volunteers with insider information.
5. Unofficial campaign materials created by supporters using new media - These included "websites devoted to Barack Obama and blogs, email essays, songs, and videos about the candidate."

The implications for health communication demonstrated by the Obama campaign support "the adage that it is best to reach people multiple times, from multiple sources and in multiple settings." Settings included television, radio, surface mail, cell phones, and computers. Also, people were likely to hear about the campaign from influencers: trusted friends and community members who forwarded emails or posted campaign information to social networking sites. In addition, new media may have been influential by creating new modes of campaign engagement. People were sharing content that they themselves had created in the form of blogs, videos, or emails, "thus moving from passing on campaign materials to creating campaign materials, ... represent[ing] an important increase in the power of self-expression by the public, a power that had been noted to be on the decline with the rise of mass communications."

As stated here: "All in all, the campaign’s use of new media appears to have extended its reach, enabled people to be reached by more trusted sources and with more tailored content, and increased modes of campaign engagement, both large and small", leaving a new standard for campaigning from which public health campaigns can take the following lessons:

• "Consider new media - social network sites, uploaded videos, mobile text messages, and blogs - as part of a comprehensive media mix.
  
• Encourage horizontal (i.e., peer-to-peer and social network) communications of campaign messages as social influence and modeling are important drivers of behavior. Embrace user-generated messages and content, especially in the case where top-down campaign messages are straightforward and translatable by the public.
  
• Use new media to encourage small acts of engagement. Small acts of engagement are important for relationship building and can lead to larger acts of engagement in the future. Additionally, small acts of engagement can have effects that ripple throughout a social network.
  
• Use social media to facilitate in-person grassroots activities, not to substitute for them."

Supporting these lessons are these data: "With over 75% of adults using the Internet (Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2007) and almost half of U.S. adults having used new media to follow and engage in the past presidential election (Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2008), use of new media by U.S. adults can be considered widespread." Further examples of the use of and policies concerning new media by the Obama post-election administration include the following:

• "[T]he Obama team created Change.gov, a website that served as a vehicle to engage the public around transition team activities. Using this website, they held 'community discussions' on such pressing topics as health care reform and received thousands of comments from the public. [Figure 2 on page 421 of the article shows a 'word cloud' posted by the Obama Health Care Transition Team to Change.gov, which summarised the over 3,500 comments made by the public on health care reform.]
• Since the inauguration, the Obama administration has worked to incorporate new media into official government communications and activities. It has created a YouTube channel and a blog on WhiteHouse.gov.
  
• The administration has started a new practice of posting all non-emergency legislation to WhiteHouse.gov, so that the public can review and comment on the legislation before it is signed into law.
  
• It has created a specialized website, recovery.gov, to help make the economic recovery process more transparent to the public.
  
• Within the government infrastructure, it has created a new center within the Department of Health and Human Services - the Center for New Media - which is charged with creating standards for federal agencies and offices to make use of new media. Additionally, Obama has hired his own special assistant on new media to advise him in this area."

The article concludes that: "...from Obama’s election campaign, it seems clear that new media technologies offer a valuable opportunity to broaden the base of support, increase reach, and actively engage people, whether in the political or public health sector."