Unfortunately, simply copying Obama can lead to problems, as Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has found with his plan to ‘cold call’ 250,000 potential supporters.  Obama’s phone bank system, in which visitors to his website could volunteer to call people in other states, resulted in a staggering two million calls just prior to the primaries in Ohio, Texas, Vermont and Rhode Island.  Clegg’s team failed to study the privacy rules and consequently the Information Commission has declared the use of unsolicited calls to be illegal in the UK.  Better luck next time Nick.

For the latest example of how certain sections of the crowd continue to be captivated by the Obama campaign, check out Sarah Silverman’s plea to her fellow Jews to visit their grandparents in Florida. 

 
The Obama team may not be directly responsible these types of initiative – Will i Am’s ‘Yes We can’ and ‘We are the one’s’ videos being the most high profile examples –  but it has created a climate in which apparently spontaneous and authentic outpourings of support are encouraged.

Nagourney quotes one political expert as saying that “the ability to drive a message narrative is all but impossible.”  It is a sentiment shared by many communications professionals beyond the world of politics, trying to engage increasingly disengaged and distracted audiences. 

The solution for Obama and McCain appears to be to forget about the glossy ads and the highly stage-managed press conferences and instead focus on genuine political debate.  It is an important lesson for any wannabe crowd surfer – if you want to connect with the crowd, you need to spend less time carefully crafting corporate messages (that will struggle to get through the media ‘fog’) and instead create opportunities or platforms for a genuine dialogue.

One of our more unlikely crowd surfing heroes is John Major – the political leader forever remembered for a grey Spitting image puppet and the disaster of the Conservative’s Back to Basics initiative in the 1990s.  This video clip from Andrew Marr’s brilliant History of Modern Britain illustrates how Major used one of the oldest crowd surfing techniques in the book – the political soapbox – to engage the crowd during the 1992 election campaign.  In the eyes of the political journalists following the campaign, it may have looked like a desperate move, but it connected with the man in the street far more effectively than Labour’s highly stage-managed conferences.

Had the Internet been a factor in the 1992 election you can be sure that Major would have taken his soapbox online.

 
Whereas Obama’s supporters have tended to use social media as a positive political force, to ‘galvanise a whole new army of supporters’, McCain’s team have, to date, been more affective at using the same channels for negative purposes … to attack Obama’s lack of experience. The Obama team has started to respond in kind, with their recent attack on McCain’s extensive property portfolio going down a storm in the blogospere. We can expect the battle to get even dirtier as we get closer to the election.