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normal company would use to define what is a good product, and
we’re going to give them to the
users and we’re going to let them
tell us.’ And so you kind of flipped
the direction of the information.
Rather than, if you’re working at
the Gap: ‘We are the tastemakers
at the top. We tell our consumers
what they’re going to buy.’ Whereas Threadless, we said, ‘You guys
are the tastemakers. You tell us
what we should make for you.’”
Reed’s tech team took this approach as it went through iterations of Dashboard, a software
platform that served as the online
hub for volunteers.
“We listened aggressively. I
mean aggressively. To the point
where people had Google alerts for
errors that they expected. [Staffers] had searches on Twitter that
were built specifically to ensure
that things were going well. If
someone said, ‘I just tried to give
$5 to the Obama campaign and it
didn’t work,’ we would be alerted
very quickly to that.”
There are limits to the bottomup doctrine. Obama supporters
could tell the campaign how to
better help it spread the word
about Obama, but they could not
dictate by popular vote what the
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president’s positions on issue after issue would be.
A few days earlier, I had asked
Goff whether there was any time
during the campaign when their
vast tech operation and their
“aggressive” listening revealed
something that they didn’t know,
and allowed them to make a
course correction, for example,
around crafting messages for particular groups of voters.
“It’s less like there was a eureka moment of, ‘Oh my God, everybody wants this,’ and more of
a just constant reading and interpreting data, every day for 20
months,” Goff said.
Goff said regular engagement
gave the campaign a good sense
of how to motivate supporters,
of what worked and what didn’t.
Reed added that the process of
soliciting feedback from volunteers
and from voters was “incredibly
manual.” The tech team had someone produce a daily digest of all the
comments sent to the campaign
from volunteers on the ground,
and merged that with what it was
hearing from the other parts of the
campaign staff in Chicago.
Obama campaign staff also
looked for supporters who were the
most outspoken and effective on
Twitter, Facebook and other social
media, and reached out to them to
offer support and give them more