Talk:Barack Obama 2012 presidential campaign

Article needs expansion

The article does not deal with how the campaign progressed and how Obama won, and, particularly, how his campaign got out the vote, which has been covered by major media. It's not all fundraising, positions, and advertising. Parkwells (talk) 14:11, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Agreed. In fact, the post-campaign speech he gave (discussed in the previous section) would tie it off nicely. -- Scjessey (talk) 16:27, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

There's a great article in Ars Technica about the technology employed by the campaign that contains a wealth of interesting tidbits for this article. -- Scjessey (talk) 16:29, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

and [1] and [2] as well. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 16:35, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

there was an unsourced section in the article about this topic, i just placed these as references for for generic statements that should probably be polished and expanded to more closely align with the specifics in the sources. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 19:58, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

dumping another source about the number of campaign offices in swing states [3] which I heard about a lot. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 20:15, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

and there is nothing about the first debate? How can that NOT be mentioned in a an article about the 2012 campaign??? -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 02:53, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

WP:BE BOLD and add it then. It can't add itself in. - M0rphzone (talk) 06:58, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Update: Ok, I went ahead and added some sections in about the debates, the Chrysler ad, and Hurricane Sandy. We just need some sources and there are plenty, but I'm too lazy to find them/cite completely, so someone else do it. - M0rphzone (talk) 07:29, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Update: Added stuff about voter analysis and predictions/modeling. We'll need to tie in the hurricane/ads/etc stuff to specifically relate/discuss the effects on the Obama campaign or what they did in response. - M0rphzone (talk) 08:09, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

It was not so much a matter of not being BOLD as a matter of being LAZY. thank you for adding it and the structure for additional expansion! -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 19:38, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

In that case, at least I did WP:put a little effort into it, but WP:don't hope the house will build itself. - M0rphzone (talk) 21:23, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Ok, the details about the tech/data/tools need to be summarized/paraphrased. Maybe we should create articles on the Narwhal, Dashboard, Optimizer, etc., and make summary sections in this article? There is so much info in the refs...normally we add content into the wiki, then find refs to cite them, but it's the other way around for this content. - M0rphzone (talk) 01:56, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Here's a list of the refs we can use so far; there is obviously a lot more: - M0rphzone (talk) 02:16, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

• Ars Technica
• NPR
• NPR
• AP
• The Atlantic
• Time

Is anyone going to attempt to paraphrase the new sections? I've already attempted to add the content in, but I'm not that great at paraphrasing content worded like the ones in the sections. - M0rphzone (talk) 01:50, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

• the business world's take on Obama's social media campaign. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 11:36, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Online tools and software

I've moved this section from the article to the talk page for a rewrite when people feel like expanding this article. - M0rphzone (talk) 07:46, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

The Obama campaign developed new online tools for 2012, including a program called Dashboard that allowed volunteers to work remotely. Volunteers could use online tools to do the same tasks that they would do from a field office.

"Software may have given the Obama for America organization's people a tiny edge—making them by some measures more efficient, better connected, and more engaged than the competition. The Obama team relied almost exclusively on Amazon's cloud computing services for computing and storage power. At its peak, the IT infrastructure for the Obama campaign took up "a significant amount of resources in AWS's Northern Virginia data center," said Ecker. "We actually had to start using beefier servers, because for a period of time we were buying up most of the available smaller Elastic Compute Cloud instance types in the East data center. Using Amazon's services, the Obama team built Narwhal — a set of services that acted as an interface to a single shared data store for all of the campaign's applications, making it possible to quickly develop new applications and to integrate existing ones into the campaign's system. Those apps include sophisticated analytics programs like Dreamcatcher, a tool developed to "microtarget" voters based on sentiments within text. And there's Dashboard, the "virtual field office" application that helped volunteers communicate and collaborate."

Besides Narwhal and Dashboard, the tech, digital, and analytics teams created the most sophisticated email fundraising program of the 2012 campaign. The digital team took their data-driven strategy to a new level. Any time you received an email from the Obama campaign, it had been tested on 18 smaller groups and the response rates had been gauged. The campaign thought all the letters had a good chance of succeeding, but the worst-performing letters did only 15 to 20 percent of what the best-performing emails could deliver. So, if a good performer could do $2.5 million, a poor performer might only net $500,000. The genius of the campaign was that it learned to stop sending poor performers.

Obama became the first presidential candidate to appear on Reddit, the massive popular social networking site. One of the AMA (Ask Me Anything) is that 30,000 Redditors registered to vote after President dropped in a link to the Obama voter registration page. The campaign also officially has the most tweeted tweet and the most popular Facebook post. Laura Olin, a former strategist at Blue State Digital who moved to the Obama campaign, ran the best campaign Tumblr so far.

The analytics team built a tool called The Optimizer, which allowed the campaign to "buy eyeballs" on television more cheaply. They took set-top box (that is to say, your cable or satellite box or DVR) data from Davidsen's old startup, Navik Networks, and correlated it with the campaign's own data. This occurred through a third party called Epsilon: the campaign sent its voter file and the television provider sent their billing file and boom, a list came back of people who had done certain things like, for example, watched the first presidential debate. Having that data allowed the campaign to buy ads that they knew would get in front of the most of their people at the least cost. They didn't have to buy the traditional stuff like the local news, either. Instead, they could run ads targeted to specific types of voters during reruns or off-peak hours.

According to CMAG/Kantar, the Obama's campaign's cost per ad was lower ($594) than the Romney campaign ($666) or any other major buyer in the campaign cycle. The Obama campaign itself aired more than 550 thousand ads, and could see that some households were only watching a couple hours of TV a day and might be willing to spend more to get in front of those harder-to-reach people."

References

• Update: And until someone actually rewrites it, don't add it back into the article. (WP:NRFPT) - M0rphzone (talk) 03:31, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

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Hot-Mic: Offering Flexibility to Russia during the 2012 election

A significant gaffe during the 2012 election was President Obama's hot mic incident where he was caught telling Russian President Medvedev that he will have flexibility to negotiate with Putin after the election. There is no mention of that anywhere on his 2012 campaign page nor on his main page, however Mitt Romney's 47% gaffe is mentioned on both is 2012 campaign page and his main page (rightfully so as it was notable).

I propose that it gets added to the page. Dy3o2 (talk) 06:34, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

References