Interactive Knowhow

With strong, heartfelt convictions and a background in PR for trade unions and leftist politicians, Matthew McGregor comes across as a charmingly un-reconstituted, died-in-the-wool socialist.

But his company, Blue State Digital, has pretensions way beyond the political arena.

In 2006, Blue State Digital was hired by Barack Obama’s Presidential Campaign to build and manage its fundraising website. The site went on to become the most effective campaign website in history, enabling over three million individuals to donate over $500 million online, supporting more than two million user profiles and soliciting more than 13 million email addresses.

Blue State Digital was identified as Obama’s “Secret Weapon” by Businessweek and “the future of politics” by The Guardian.

Last year, Matthew was employed by Blue State Digital to set up its London operation. That’s where we are now: chatting on the sofas on the ground floor of Freud Communications’ building in London’s West End, where the UK office is based.

Although Matthew was not directly involved in the Obama campaign, he spent time alongside his US colleagues in the run up to the US Presidential Election last November. There he witnessed, first hand, the tremendous drive and dynamism of Obama’s support base which was constantly captured and reinvigorated via the campaign website.

Blue State Digital’s suite of online tools include a powerful mass e-mailer, a phone bank – which readily identifies “hot” or “warm” contacts - and an invite tool. These might be considered as typical campaign tools, but Matthew is keen to see their application across the board:

“The spark of what we do is community: where people are able to come together in terms of a common goal, not just political - it could be in terms of test-launching a new product. Politicians generally are really unpopular but look at the spark of engagement you get from someone wanting to test a new Blackberry! Companies have more sense of community than they realise.”

It’s unsurprising that Matthew refers to politicians less than favourably: we’re meeting on the Tuesday after a long Easter weekend which has brought disastrous news for the British Prime Minister and the UK Labour Party: Gordon Brown’s advisor Damian McBride has resigned after authoring a leaked email outlining an alarmingly misguided plan to spread nasty – and unfounded - rumours about rival MPs via the web.

Though he sighs and shakes his head at the thought of McBride, Matthew cites John Prescott and Tom Watson as two UK MPs who really “get” how to use the internet: “They understand the fundamental kernel of authenticity”.

“It’s all about engaging with people directly, on an authentic basis - engaging with people on their issues, in a language they understand.”

And this language of engagement can apply easily in business, believes Matthew.

“Maybe it’s a peculiarly British thing, to be so under-stated. I’m really struck by the language of sacrifice that permeates the UK. In Sweden, their language is of solidarity. In Britain, it’s a sacrifice. In the US, it’s hope. But the language of sacrifice is not inspiring!”

From his political and advocacy campaigns, Matthew has learnt that people need to be given positive messages to make them feel it’s worthwhile to take part in something, and this is just as true for business projects as it is for everything else:

“Being authentic, being engaging and putting people to work applies across the board.”

“You need to encourage people to take action: they need to be encouraged, incentivised, given a reward to take part in the bigger picture.”

In this, Matthew echoes the mantra of all successful social networks: give people a genuine personal motive, and they’ll participate. The importance of a strong underlying community cannot be under-stated:

“Obama wasn’t the first person to do this but [he’s been] far and away the most successful. So people see that campaign and want to emulate it. There’s not a huge amount of difference between Obama and Howard Dean in terms of the actual campaign but in terms of success, yes! Obama did get new media, yes, but what he got was community organising: the principles of good new media community.”

Matthew would love to get more corporate clients, but he’s not completely indiscriminate: true to his party roots, he draws the line at working for one David Cameron.

That’s a shame. Blue State Digital could do great things for the Conservative Party. No matter. I get the feeling that, sooner or later, a beleaguered Gordon Brown (or his successor) might just be giving Matthew a call.

It’s the day before the G20 Summit in London and Karin Robinson should be out on the streets, leading the pro-Obama rally she’s been promoting. Instead, she’s put her back out, so she’s confined to her flat, going a little stir crazy and watching news of the various demonstrations (mostly peaceful, but more anti than pro G20) online.

“There’s all these protesters and my question is: let’s say you got what you wanted? But do they have an agenda? My philosophy is to have very clear goals. If these protesters are trying to influence the [G20] meeting, they should have a lobby list. One of the signs I’ve seen says “Abolish Money”! Personally, from a ‘liking things to work well’ point of view, they need to know what they want.”

As a US citizen based in the UK, Karin knows all about agenda-setting. She worked as a regional field director on Barack Obama’s US presidential campaign between July and November last year. Her remit was to mobilse as many US Democratic voters as possible across the UK, Ireland, Scandinavia and South Africa.

Despite her London base, Karin was in daily contact with the campaign headquarters in Washington, DC.

“I was reporting back [to the US] on a daily basis,” she says. “And every day we’d get reviewed targets back. David Plouffe, the Campaign Manager, was looking at very detailed data.”

“There was a lot of pressure to reach targets, we were really working our tails off. But it would have been easy to miss the opportunity to capitalise on all those volunteers. There were stories that McCain volunteers were being sent home because the campaign wasn’t prepared for them.”

By contrast, the Obama Campaign was meticulously organised at every level:

“In some of our key states we had forty per cent of people having some kind of contact with the campaign. [The campaign organisers] made it clear from the start that they wanted an unprecedented level of contact – face to face contact – the ability to use social media to make that happen was a very clever exploitation.”

Karin goes on to describe how the campaign used sites such as Facebook and MeetUp as an adjunct to, and extension of, face-to-face contact.

“We were using [social networks] to find people and to communicate and to directly organise…Every single objective [was about] getting people offline. Every YouTube video would end with “Go volunteer, go give money, go do this!”. One of Obama’s signature endings for his stump speech, his generic campaign trail speech, was “So if you’ll work with me, come out and vote with me, we’ll do this!”. The whole tenor of the event was geared towards getting people out.”

This emphasis on calls to action was present at all levels of the campaign. Karin remembers the Democratic Nomination Convention which took place in a 75,000 seater stadium in Denver in August 2008:

“Under every seat was a piece of paper with a list of names. Before people came out and started doing speeches, the voter registration director asked everyone to take out their mobiles and call four people on their list. We wanted to send a signal at the highest possible level that this was a volunteer-led campaign.”

One famous revolutionary aspect of the Obama Campaign was the fact that it was the first in history to be majority-funded by small donations. By the end of the campaign, the official White House website was transformed from an authoritarian, text-heavy front page to a welcoming portal, a smiling Obama beaming from the top-right corner.

On Obama’s Change website, Google Moderator has been used to enable US citizens to vote up issues of importance to them (although the “Open For Questions” function raised eyebrows earlier this year when marijuana legalisation topped the poll). MyBarackObama continues as a thriving community, with the “Obama For America” campaign now rebranded as “Organising For America”. Obama’s Twitter stream, MySpace, Bebo and Facebook profiles all remain active.

Obama also has an offline way of getting a feel for what’s bothering people at a grassroots level. Every day, according to Karin, he asks for a selection of letters from the public to glance through: “He’s really concerned that once you become President you become detached from reality. He’s very serious about not loosing touch.”

And Karin adds that despite Obama being a great listener, sometimes our expectations of him run impossibly high:

“Obama really is listening to people but what you’ve got to remember is he’s not just listening to you. People sometimes mistake listening for acquiescence.”