The Social Revolution in Politics:Obama’s Guru Gives Talk in Milan

The U.S. elections were also social. To understand what has changed since 2008, Obama’s spin doctor, Michael Slaby, gave a presentation along with Beppe Severgnini and Marcello Foa at a meeting on Social Media and New Forms of Communication in Politics

Four years ago Barack Obama was elected the 43rd president of the U.S.: Making history not only because Mr. Obama was the first African-American president in the history of the country but also because of the electoral campaign that enabled him to reach this goal.

The innovative and bold use of the social media — Facebook in particular — and the creation of a real crew of volunteers who used every tool available online and offline, made Barack Obama the most powerful man in the world and ushered him into world history.

On Nov. 7, 2012, Obama was re-elected but how has his communication strategy changed, if it has changed? To understand it, Voices from the Blogs, the Observatory on Social Media of the University of Milan and the U.S. Consulate General in Milan organized a meeting dedicated to the role of social media in the American electoral campaign and more. The title of the meeting was “Social Media and New Forms of Communication in Politics: #US2012 Presidential Election” and the guest of honor was Michael Slaby, chief integration and innovation officer for Barack Obama’s team, who actually organized social media for Obama’s two election campaigns in 2008 and 2012. Slaby explained that the real innovation was the smarter use of Twitter: In 2008 this social platform was still very new and all its communicative and persuasive possibilities had not been explored yet. Using Twitter in a more sophisticated way permitted the Obama campaign to mobilize more than 700,000 volunteers who tried to communicate with extreme cohesiveness about a value more than an agenda. What matters when campaigning in an election is to communicate — who you are, your mission, then translating it into action: A tweet, therefore a vote. Compared to 2008, in 2012 social media made even more intricate and complex the networks of relationships among the different media and among those who use them and what is communicated. It is necessary, explains Slaby, to provide people with the tools and the platform to give voice to a mission, to a value. This is the power of social media, able to carry out the principal functions of a political campaign: To sell a good — in this case a value — and serve the customer.

The meeting was also attended by Beppe Severgnini, a journalist for the Corriere della Sera and Marcello Foa, the former managing editor of the Giornale.it — the site on which he still continues to write a very successful blog about national and international politics — and is now the chief executive of the Swiss publishing group TI Media. Severgnini pointed out Italian politicians’ inability to use social media. Indeed, when the question of how many people worked for political parties was asked in the audience, only two people raised their hands. A paltry number if you consider that the room was almost full and that these two people and that of the two, one was a representative of a tiny faction of the Christian Democrats and the other is the spin doctor of the mayor of Genoa. In short, none of the major Italian political parties had sent a single representative or spin doctor to the meeting. A significant fact indeed, but maybe not enough to depict, as Severgnini did, Italians as a people unable to handle a mouse and to communicate about politics through social media.

But if the Italian politicians don’t know how to use the social media, there is a much to say about the way — often narcissistic — that Italian journalists approach Twitter. Some of them tweet a lot but often it is more accommodate a trend than to really have a dialogue with the readers at a time when they risk being bypassed by social media themselves. When Severgnini declared that Twitter is “the truth machine,” meaning that no one can lie on Twitter, Foa, who is also the dean of the communications department at USI, University of Italian Switzerland, in Lugano and at the Catholic University, turned up his nose. Are we really sure about that? And are we really sure that what is defined as a social revolution is an actual one? Or maybe social media appeal to the feelings of empathy, esteem, attraction rather than the sharing of an agenda, a word which, just like the word blog, noted Foa, Slaby never mentioned when describing Obama’s campaign?

In short, more than guaranteeing the transparency and authenticity of a value, aren’t social media rather the tools to “sell” a product, in this case a politician? Regarding this provocation, the declaration made by Slaby that “we campaign in poetry but we govern in prose” doesn’t seem fortuitous. And anyone who has studied a minimum of rhetoric knows that poetry is written by appealing to feelings, to the irrationality of passion, while prose to reason and logic.