TIME.COM -
White House Memo -
Can They Win, One Tweet at a Time? -
By Michael Scherer -
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Can They Win, One Tweet at a Time?
Some excerpts :
When Barack Obama traveled to Texas this month to talk immigration, David Plouffe, his top message guru, decided to stay home and watch Twitter instead. While Obama spoke, Plouffe sat before two flat-screen televisions in the White House complex. One showed live footage of Obama in El Paso. The other flickered with a lightning-quick vertical ticker tape of people tweeting with the #immigration hashtag, reacting line by line to the President in real time. "I find it useful," Plouffe says, "to see what's penetrating."
When Obama went off script to joke that Republicans would soon demand a border moat filled with alligators, a blur of Twitter messages showed people sending the quote to friends and followers, signaling a messaging victory of sorts. "It's kind of the next evolution," Plouffe explains. "Remember back in 2008, you'd have the presidential debate, and then most of the networks would have some sort of dial going up and down. That seems very Jurassic Park–like compared to this."
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Plouffe, who served as Obama's 2008 campaign manager, is an engineer, more interested in data, numbers and quantifiable metrics than in storytelling. He uses the word cume as a verb — meaning "to build up a cumulative audience" — and describes other people as "influence hubs."
From the moment he arrived in January, Plouffe changed the way the White House unfolds each morning. He demanded far more precision and repetition in the language used by the President and his surrogates. ("Win the future," ad nauseam.) He sought greater outreach to state and local media outlets. (West Wing aides now get news summaries from regional papers and local 6 o'clock news broadcasts, not just national publications.) And he doubled down on efforts by the White House to use social media to spread its message.
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