In part one of this conversation with David Weinberger, Howard Dean's volunteer Internet guru, Weinberger explained the Dean campaign's gutsy step of handing off control of the all-important message. But they didn't hand it to campaign professionals -- they let bloggers and a fast-growing Internet community craft the message themselves in their own communities.
The risk paid off. It played a key role in creating Howard Dean, The Brand online and in traditional media. It's something no other campaign has done.
"The [Wesley] Clark campaign was pretty good," Weinberger says. "But they seemed not to have the guts to just let a bunch of young people generally speak for the campaign. But what these young people say turns out to be positive. You didn’t go to the Web log to get criticism of Dean, which would be perfectly reasonable. It was positive."
The blog was driven by a Colorado man in his 30s named Matthew Gross. It solved a problem campaigns have battled for decades -- how to pack 48 hours of demands into a 24-hour day. Unless you can shift the space-time continuum, there's no way candidates can touch as many people as would like to touch them.
"Matthew was just a guy who was personable and enthusiastic, and that made a type of connection between the voter and the candidate that you can’t do directly to the candidate," Weinberger says. "I didn’t know how insanely packed candidate's schedules are. You try to get ten minutes and you can’t do it. So, like it or not, the candidate simply doesn’t have time to do casual communication with supporters."
Happy accidents in blog-land
Weinberger says no one knew what the campaign would step into when they stepped into the blog. But what they found were plenty of happy accidents. "They opened up the comments, and they did this in a proper, experimental Net way. You know, 'Let’s give it a try.' And it worked really well, and in ways that nobody could expect."
The blog gave anyone who participated a sense of ownership in the community and the Dean brand. One positive factor was blogging's natural lack of threading. That eliminated flame wars and thread hijacking -- they censored only a handful of posts out of hundreds of thousands, for scatological reasons.
"The comment facility for the blog happened to be minimal -- that’s what comes with that technology. It’s just a white box you type into. There’s no threading. In fact, there’s not even a way to link back to a previous comment," Weinberger says.
"Anybody could write in. And commenters started, in ways that I would never have anticipated, to feel ownership. They felt they were bloggers because they were commenting regularly on this board. And the comments would spin off from whatever the particular blog entry was into their own conversations. And just as an accident, the comment facility was not designed for hundreds of commenters, so you could not refer back easily to another comment."
That was the key to keeping it positive. "Say you’re reading the blog comments and somebody says something that you disagree with. By the time you enter your comment, you’re probably 30 or 40 or 50 entries away from it, and there’s no way to point back to it. So the sort of negative, endless, nattering and disputes and name-calling and nastiness couldn’t happen," Weinberger says.
"Of course, people could write in very nasty things, but you couldn’t get any momentum behind them because there just wasn’t a way. So these little properties of technology turn out to have unexpected effects, and in this case it happened to be a felicitous one," he says.
It was all about belonging. "The comments turned into a good way for supporters to form a type of social connection. The actual enthusiasm came from the connection, which is great for democracy and great for a campaign if it can sustain itself and spread, which in the Dean case it didn’t."
In addition to building a community of "Deaniacs," as the campaign called them, the Internet showed its power in one other area critical to any candidate -- fundraising. The average donation was $75, which some would describe as insignificant. But put enough of those together, and, "It was the most successful fundraising thing in history," Weinberger says. "For small donations, he raised more in one quarter than anybody did, including [Bill] Clinton when he was sitting President. That just amazed people, and that, to a large degree, was due to the Internet."
Should the Internet share blame, glory or both?
Ultimately, Dean bowed out of the race before he won a primary. Does the Internet deserve any of the blame? And how much credit should it take?
"Well, it can’t by itself, as a technology, get a candidate elected," Weinberger says. "But I’m not sure that anybody thought that it could. It’s deeply unclear exactly what good and exactly what harm the Internet side of the campaign did for Dean. The thing that I worry about is people who look at this very simply and say, 'Dean was doing very well. He did remarkably well on the Internet. Dean’s candidacy failed. Therefore, the Internet failed Dean.' That seems to me to be just plain wrong."
"Campaigns are incredibly complex social events, and it’s like trying to decide what the real cause of the Civil War was," Weinberger says. "So we don’t know if his early momentum was real. He polled incredibly well. He had record crowds turn out early in the campaign, way earlier in the campaign than is usual, and he raised a lot of money. So they’re objective measures. But that can also be explained by enthusiastic early adopters for a campaign that never crossed the chasm.”
"The media both lionized him and dumped on him, but it’s really hard to tell what effect that had on whom. There’s uncertainty at every level of this. We don’t how big his support was; so we don’t know exactly how far his fall was. We have no idea. So it makes it really hard to look at -- so I don’t know."
But it did prove that the Internet can create and feed active, engaged political communities on a national level. That's new.
"The Internet did not simply raise money and did not simply connect, although he had, like, 650,000 signed up, whatever that means. It provided a way for early supporters to organize themselves and to have a sense of participation in the campaign like many of us have never felt before. Whether that mattered, was it delusional, was it insignificant -- those are not questions that actually can be answered," Weinberger says.
"You could explain the fervor of the Deaniacs, which seems like a real thing, as the result of Dean’s magnetism, which actually seems pretty unlikely to me. He’s actually not a very magnetic candidate. Or you could say that it was a sign of the desperate dislike, anger, at Bush among Democrats. Or you could say that it was a media creation. Or you could say it was an Internet bubble. How are you going to decide that?"
What's the lesson here for brand marketers -- it might be to build a community around your product and let that fervor become part of the brand.
"Every conversation I had with anybody, with supporters, about Dean, the middle third of it would be, 'Here’s where we disagree with Dean on the issues. I think he’s wrong about gun control. I really don’t like what he said about this or that,'" Weinberger says.
"This was a campaign that was sparked by a candidate that is a brand, if you must, in which loyalty was around that brand and, to some extent, to that brand -- we were Deaniacs, after all -- but wasn’t as focused on the brand as marketers would like. The enthusiasm, the mania, the joy of it came from the connection to other Dean supporters.”
David Weinberger wrote comedy bits for Woody Allen and was a professor of philosophy before he aimed his deep understanding of the long sweep of history and ideas at the Internet. He wrote Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, writes for major media and consults with blue-chip clients. He'll also be one of the keynoters at the May iMedia Agency Summit in Maryland.
