From 50,000 Feet

“The Brand Called Obama” was Fast Company’s cover story for its April edition, but I just ran across it now thanks to No Quarter.  The theme is “the degree to which his success indicates a seismic shift on the business horizon as well.”

Obama has deftly embraced — and been embraced by — the Internet. His campaign has deputized soccer grandmoms and hipsters alike to generate new heights of viral support. And he has been exceptionally successful at converting online clicks into real-world currency: rallies in the heartland, videos on YouTube, and most important, donations and votes.

The question is how. Social networking poses challenges for marketers, no matter what — or whom — they’re selling. Traditional top-down messages don’t often work in an ecosystem where the masses are in charge. Marketers must cede a certain degree of control over their brands. And that can be terrifying. (Remember that “I got a crush on … Obama” lip-synched YouTube tribute?)

Yet giving up control online, in the right way, unleashes its own power. And more than any other “national product” to date — and far more than any other presidential candidate — Obama has tapped into that power.

The key is Facebook.  Literally, not metaphorically.  Obama’s campaign hired one of Facebook’s co-founders, Chris Hughes.  Hughes was not the tech architect for Facebook.  His expertise was communicating through and with social networks.  The key is to give people who want to get involved something to do.

The campaign’s Web site is “far more dynamic than any of the others,” says Bentley College professor Christine Williams, who has been studying Web sites and social media in campaigns with her colleague Jeff Gulati. BarackObama.com features constant updates, videos, photos, ringtones, widgets, and events to give supporters a reason to come back to the site. On mybarackobama.com, the campaign’s quasi-social network, Obamaniacs can create their own blogs around platform issues, send policy recommendations directly to the campaign, set up their own mini fund-raising site, organize an event, even use a phone-bank widget to get call lists and scripts to tele-canvass from home.

Indeed.  For purposes of writing this post, I decided to check out mybarackobama.com.  I signed up in about three seconds. Five seconds later I was being set up to make get-out-the-vote calls to Oregon.

Social media forms the landscape, but Fast Company identifies Obama with a style of leadership that fits best into that landscape:

Having a vision and inspiring or instructing others to follow that vision have long been hallmarks of business and politics. But Obama epitomizes a new way of thinking called “adaptive leadership,” which is now being taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School, among other places. This approach, as Stephen Bouwhuis recently wrote in The Australian Journal of Public Administration, is effective in handling problems that necessitate “a shift … in ways of thinking across a community.” While a visionary puts forth a specific plan to be implemented, an adaptive leader works with constituents to devise one together.

This style of leadership might explain why, until recently, Obama’s appeal seemed to transcend the rather conventional liberalism suggested by his voting record. He embraces a process that invites participation, collaboration and — to use a webby term — crowdsourcing.

Marty Linsky, professor at the Kennedy School and cofounder of Cambridge Leadership Associates, is among those who’ve taken note of Obama’s adaptive style. “Obama often proposes process plans that involve a trust in the community at large,” Linsky says. The potential ramifications for business leadership are enormous. The cult of the imperial chief executive officer still reigns in most C-suites and boardrooms. But winning tomorrow’s talent — and tomorrow’s consumer — may require a dramatically different approach.

And not only to reach the young: Dennis Edwards, a white 50-year-old small-businessman from South Carolina, told me that his main issue in the presidential campaign is health care. “I know that no candidate can push their plan completely through,” he says. “That’s not cynicism, that’s reality. But I believe Obama can get people to the table to talk. I think he’ll listen to other points of view. I also believe he can move it further in the right direction than anyone else.”

This resonates with a lot of people because the hyper-partisanship of the past two administrations has led only to stalemate as Dems and Reeps checkmate each other on issues ranging from foreign intelligence to health insurance.  Icebergs keep floating into view, but the ship’s course can’t change because the partisans are too busy fighting over the tiller. Voters are impatient with this kind of politics, but no one seems able to change it.

It’s not yet clear Obama’s going to get a chance; or whether, if he succeeds, he’d be able to run his administration the way he’s run his campaign.   But regardless of your political hopes and dreams for 2008, you can thank Obama and his staff for giving us a glimpse of how smart companies will adapt to the changing consumer expectations in the social-media-infused marketplace.

Since the article ran, of course, Obama’s run into some heavy weather that illustrate a danger of open-source communications as a means of reinforcing brand identity and building loyalty.  We thought we knew what Obama was all about, and the next thing you know, he’s calling small-town Pennsylvanians bitter people who cling to God and guns, and trying to distance himself from his unhinged pastor of 20 years. Both stories ran wild on the Internet and then leapt into the mainstream press.  The effect seems to have been to polarize the Democratic voter base into two camps — those who still love Obama as much as they did before, and those who don’t trust him.

He’s probably still got the nomination in his grasp, so the interesting thing will be to see how he merges his fan base with the Democratic skeptics he needs to win over, and whether he can also revive February’s enthusiasm for him among independents and some Republicans. His style of management could be an asset, or it could blow up in his face, forcing him to abandon it.  This is a communications lab experiment going on right in front of us, folks.

I mentioned the site No Quarter as having referred me to the Fast Company story.  That illustrates a point, too.  No Quarter’s bloggers mostly don’t like Obama, preferring Hillary Clinton.  From their jaded perspective, Obama is trying to be three brands, perhaps illegitimately, in order to broaden his appeal:

The Professor.  The Obama I saw early on.  The Obama who appeals to my highly educated, upscale friends on our democratic town committee.  The Obama we heard at the San Francisco fund raiser.  This is the serious, thoughtful Obama we see on Meet the Press.

The Rock Star.  This is the Obama that speaks to crowds of young people with rock stars playing to warm up the crowd and Obama scratching his cheek with the middle finger.  This is the snarky Obama, the “I love you back” Obama and the one that is sold via text messaging, email and the blogs.

The Preacher. The Obama of the Trinity Church who could actually be an incredible preacher.  This is the Obama that makes the inspiring, rabble rousing speeches that have defined his campaign.  This is the Hope^TM> and Change^TM> Obama.

True, I suppose, but that’s no different from any other candidate for president, who must sheathe and unsheathe his or her erudition as the occasion demands. All of our presidents are much smarter than they let on, and they all present different faces at different times, as this classic SNL skit illustrates.

The point of Fast Company’s article has less to do with Obama on the stump and more with Obama as a node of activity, around which collaborative networks have formed and will continue to form–perhaps in pursuit of goals beyond just getting the candidate elected.  It’s forgivable if you want to hope that a new process will help us finally to resolve some old problems that continue to haunt our country.

Tags: Barack Obama, Facebook, Fast Company, social media