How Obama Treated His New Media Team

Not as technology but as communication:

At a New Organizing Institute presentation this morning, former Obama new media director Joe Rospars (last seen in these pages talking about the importance of good content to the campaign’s work) made a really significant point — his department was NOT a part of the campaign’s tech team. Instead, it was coequal with communications, field/grassroots, finance, etc., and was in fact just as much a client of the technology folks as, say, the press team was.

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This also gets at a deeper issue in the online advocacy world — that political people often think of the internet as technology, when really it’s communications. Often, the problems political groups encounter in online outreach have nothing to do with hardware, software or websites, and everything to do with institutional systems and institutional structures. In other words, it’s not the tools, it’s the people and how they’re organized and directed to USE the tools.

It’s practically impossible to argue that Obama’s new/social media outreach wasn’t miles ahead of anything he opposed.  Maybe this is part of the reason why – a fundamental difference in how it was treated compared to other camps.