Friends talking to Friends

A while back I blogged about the social network strategy of the Huckabee campaign and how it was accomplishing a lot with very little (money). The campaign was using the power of the social tie/link -- friends talking to friends about voting. Good strategy, limited population. Huckabee focused on well-defined clusters, like christian evangelicals, that tend to be very insular and limited in size. With insular cliques, your strategy may work, but it only goes so far -- influence does not cross the chasm to other groups.

The Obama campaign is also following a grass-roots, bottom-up, friends-talking-to-friends strategy as described in the current issue Rolling Stone magazine. To get the vote out, they are using both the Internet AND Obama's experience of F2F organizing. They get the technology. They get the sociology.

In addition, the Obama folks seem to have learned the lesson of the Howard Dean campaign which focused mostly on technology, but were clueless about sociology. Howard Dean's staff organized the Deaniacs over the WWW, but then resorted to the strangers-talking-to-strangers strategy. To accentuate their mistake, they made their activists were bright orange hats which just emphasized them being "not one of us" as they canvassed Iowa neighborhoods. Obama knows that in organizing, locals need to interact with locals.

Yet, the mostly top-down political machine of Hillary Clinton has won elections -- especially the big states. Which strategy will win out? Pennsylvania is the next test. More than a month to go... are the bottom-up networks of influence in place, are locals talking to locals? Or will the top-down barrage of mass media carry the day? Will Hillary borrow the local social networks of her friend and supporter, Pennsylvania's governor Ed Rendell? Are the Obama folks building wide-reaching radial networks, or are they also falling prey to the Huckabee problem of getting trapped in cul de sacs?

Which view will win?

top down...


bottom up...


or both and...

Originally published March 6, 2008