Huffington Magazine Issue 32 | Page 50

BREATHING FIRE 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 HUFFINGTON 01.20.13 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