On election night, it became the most re-tweeted photo in the history of social media: a picture of President Obama hugging his wife, Michelle.
But the dissemination of that iconic image is only the tip of a far larger iceberg that sank Mitt Romney. Yes, demographics helped Obama beat him. But so did the changing landscape of media consumption. The very groups – young women, Hispanics, African Americans, Asian-Americans – that made the difference are among the fastest adopters of social and mobile media.
The Obama campaign understood and rode this convergence of demographics and media, even as Karl Rove spent $300 million on television advertising that helped garner nearly two-thirds of white males only to find himself, to his everlasting surprise, on the losing side of the national election.
Republicans may lament that this is not their father's country but more to the point this is not their father's marketing either. Irreversible change in the country's demography collided with irresistible change in the consumption of media. While older white males get their information from television the people who made the difference are on Twitter, Tumblr and smart phones generally. They may even be making decisions about politics differently than their predecessors and there will only be more of them entering the market and the electorate.
In 2008, much of the after-action analysis of social media was of the "gee-whiz" variety – Obama outperformed McCain in this new medium! – yet the precise effect was not exactly clear, other than that it helped win over younger voters. It relied, to a large extent, on sheer volume. The Obama team out-staffed, out-emailed and simply swamped the McCain effort with dozens as many Twitter followers and 400 percent more followers on Facebook.
But the Obama effort in 2008 built more than buzz; it created conversions, according to academic research performed by Jennifer Aaker, a business professor at Stanford, along with researcher Victoria Chang. The campaign built 5 million supporters on social networks, had 2.5 million followers on Facebook, and 50 million viewers watched 14 million hours of video on YouTube, which was then pretty new. This translated into huge offline results: 230,000 events and $639 million raised from 3 million donors. On Election Day, every supporter with a mobile phone number the Obama campaign had in its database got three text message reminders to vote. Obama won by more than 8 million votes.
Of course, an exhaustive study of Obama's social media in 2012 has not yet been conducted – it's only a matter of time – but the initial reporting indicates a similar performance. The president's team, with the head-start of a huge database of supporters, just out-muscled Romney's campaign. By September 2012, Obama's Facebook page had 1.2 million likes – while Romney's had just half as much, according to Inc.'s Meaghan Ouimet. Obama had twice as many YouTube likes, comments and views as Romney -and easily 20 times as many re-tweets as the Republican nominee. Interestingly, the Obama campaign has not yet been all that eager to share its social media victory strategy, though Pro Publica is busy trying to crack the story.
The difference in content and effort created results. Women for Obama, run by the Obama team on Facebook, created a story line mixing text and graphics: It was about the rights of women, their desire to control their own health care and their voting power. Only when that narrative was engaging users did the Obama campaign make the ask, getting them to donate, call or vote. "We Vote, We Decide" was posted right before the election and the page had 1.3 million likes. On the other hand, Moms for Mitt, run by the Romney campaign, had less thematic construction, featuring photos of volunteers, images of Romney and his running mate, and posts urging the "moms" to vote or make calls. It netted just 93,000 likes.
Generally speaking, social media has not proven itself able to change someone's mind as much as it is capable of putting together communities of like-minded people. We don't know the correlation of "liking," say, on Facebook with voting behavior. But putting people together who are like-minded allows them to take other actions: to reach out to more friends online or to join old-school telephone drives and events and also to take more committed actions, like raising money. Obama raised $147 million from small donors who chipped in $200 or less, nearly three-and-a-half times as much as Romney. The barrage of constant e-mails from both campaigns also likely didn't change minds. It was just the kind of consistency – however irritating – that reminded people to donate and then to vote.
This is about more than media. The Obama campaign correctly understood that to reach certain cohorts most effectively it would have to move beyond traditional media to the media that most resonates with Hispanics, young women, African-Americans and even Asian-Americans. Consider Latinos. The 50.5 million Hispanics in the country have higher usage rates of mobile and social media than Anglos. African Americans and Hispanics have adopted Twitter at faster rates than whites or Anglos.
Consider women, too, of various ethnic backgrounds, who have embraced smart phones faster than their non-Hispanic white counterparts. More than three in five women who are of African American, Hispanic or Asian-American had a smartphone in 2011, compared to just one in three white women, according to Nielsen.
More than three in four Asian-American women believe that smartphones improve their lives, while just one in four is inclined to say the same thing about the most tried and trusted medium in American politics: Television.
The Obama campaign spent a fortune on traditional advertising, too, some of which also targeted, women and Latinos. The Democrats, though, leavened their communications spending with other media, like any smart marketer today. Which brings us to Republicans and their reliance on television. Not only did they think the demographic coalition that turned out in 2008 was a fluke, but they were preaching, through the television set, to their own choir. Less than one-in-five adults under 30 watch cable television news, according the Pew Research Center, while over half of people over 65 do.
Many of these insights are drawn from the world of market research, not political campaigns, and they're fast becoming fairly common knowledge. Market research is actively helping companies embrace, say, the $1 trillion Hispanic market, as opposed to threatening to get people to "self-deport." In business it's about addition, not subtraction. In California, Alan Zorfas, the president of the market research firm Motista, found a way to explain how President Obama – on the wrong side of so many traditional polling measures, like right-track-wrong track and the economy – was able to defy gravity. Different cohorts simply liked him, thought he was cooler or believed he truly empathized with them, regardless of his track record. "Obama is an Apple," Zorfas told me, "while Romney is a Dell."
All of this suggests not only that a key shift has long since gotten underway in demographics and media, but also that younger voters make decisions differently. They are constantly informed, messaged and reinforced by their deluge of text and Twitter messages – all coming from their friends, families and co-workers – hundreds if not thousands of times a day. While Obama lost a few points off his overall white vote, he still swamped Romney among all people under 30, the first and fastest adopters of social media, by 5 million votes (even though fewer younger voters turned out than in 2008). As if to underscore the Democratic edge, even after the polls closed in Virginia, the Obama campaign was still texting volunteers to make sure everyone in line stayed and voted.
Right now, the Republican Party is talking a lot about immigration, Marco Rubio and copying Obama's get-out-the-vote effort – all of which suggests a profound misunderstanding of what really happened in 2012 and could set the stage for a repeat in 2016.
Richard Parker is the president of Parker Research in Austin, Tex. His commentary is syndicated by McClatchy-Tribune