Marketing Begins At Home

The “New Organizers” have succeeded in building what many netroots-oriented campaigners have been dreaming about for a decade. Other recent attempts have failed because they were either so “top-down” and/or poorly-managed that they choked volunteer leadership and enthusiasm; or because they were so dogmatically fixated on pure peer-to-peer or “bottom-up” organizing that they rejected basic management, accountability and planning. The architects and builders of the Obama field campaign, on the other hand, have undogmatically mixed timeless traditions and discipline of good organizing with new technologies of decentralization and self-organization.

From The Huffington Post

The world of organizational science has changed dramatically. Witness the decentralized / centralized Obama campaign as it changes the rules of political campaigns across a battleground state near you.

The real change is the lowered cost of participation. Not in the dollars and cents sense of cost but in the effort involved in getting up off of the couch. We don’t have to find our checkbook, an envelope and a stamp anymore to make a contribution to our favorite candidate. We can do it with two clicks of a mouse.

The Obama campaign is at the forefront of this right now. If I want to call voters in swing states, I have an iPhone app that will do the work for me. But pretty soon the rest of the political spectrum will catch up and then watch out.