Kristine Lowe

Six quick social media lessons from the Obama campaign

Jodi Williams from the Obama Campaign Team was in Oslo last week to talk about lessons learnt from the 2008 presidential campaign. Here's a few quick highlights I took away from her talk (I'd have posted this sooner if it wasn't for ongoing computer trouble):


Picture of Williams by Tord Nedrelid published under a CC-license

• Social media turns out to be very crucial these days for reaching out, not only to younger demographics, but quite widely - especially for reaching the demographic that’s really busy and not home to sit down and watch ABC News at six
• The Twitter effect will play a much bigger part in future elections along with texting. We could have used texting and twitter much more effectively
• Really excited by how mobile networks will change campaigning and reporting
• No longer one way comunication but a two way coversation that can turn into a movement
• It’s about giving people the opportunity to organise themselves. Social media offers good tools to organise people and to help them find each other
• The Clinton-campaign was stuck in the past. We had younger people who were not stuck in ideas on how to do and organise things and were free to look ahead

These notes are taken from a talk Williams gave at a seminar on politics and social media organised by The Institute of Journalism 05.06.2009. My write-up of key headlines from the Norwegian talks are here (in Norwegian)

Summing up the Scandinavian media year 2008

No, this is not one of those summaries xxx weeks after the events: if anything, I put together the usual summary of the region's key media events a bit too early in 2008 (my deadline was mid-October).

Then I got a bit too busy, forgot to be on the lookout for when it went oline, and ended up stumbling across it by chance recently. Surprisingly, the summary still holds up pretty well, the only events that took a slightly different turn from when I wrote it were Baugur pulling out of the proposed merger of Frettbladid and Posthusid Arvakri, the publisher of Morgunbladid, and bailing out the media arm of 365media, which owns Frettabladid.

Of course, Iceland is not strictly a part of Scandinavia, although foreigners often think so, but this story was so intertwined with developements in Danish media last year that it was decided to put it all under the same headline.

The focus of the summary is largely on structural changes, like mergers and acquisitions and new laws affecting the region's media industry, but there's also a bit on online development in there.

Trend of the Year (2008): Epic Organisational Failure

"It’s rare to look back over a year of corrections and errors and see so many examples of organisational failure. Years past have seen plenty of malfeasance by individuals, but 2008 is remarkable for news organisations that pursued completely outrageous behavior," reports Regret the Error (more details over there) (via Joanna Geary on Twitter).