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![Meet the Mind Behind Barack Obama’s Online Persona
You’ve most definitely seen it by now. Michelle Obama, wearing a red-and-white checkered dress, stands with her back to the camera. Her arms are wrapped around her husband, the hints of a smile lingering on the edges of his lips. “Four more years,” reads the text, which was posted on the Obama campaign’s social media accounts around 11:15pm on election night‚ just as it became clear the president had won a second term.
The photo, taken by campaign photographer Scout Tufankjian just a few days into the job, pretty much won the internet: 816,000 retweets, the most likes ever on Facebook; thousands of reblogs on Tumblr. And yet it wasn’t chosen by the president’s press secretary, or even a senior-level operative, but by 31-year-old Laura Olin, a social media strategist who’d been up since 4am. For the first time since the campaign ended, she talked to Tumblr, in partnership with The Daily Beast, about what it’s like being the voice of the President — where millions of people, and a ravenous press, await your every grammatical error.
So how does it actually work, being the voice of the President? Who makes the decisions about what to post?
All of our decisions were made in-house — in Chicago, mostly — so we weren’t getting direct directives from the White House or anything. But we tried as much as possible to have voices for each account, so depending on the message — because we had all these channels — we had an appropriate place to put it. Obviously some stuff was sufficiently huge so that it went everywhere, but as much as possible we tried to tailor the message for the channel and the audience.
It must be daunting.
It was kind of terrifying, actually. My team ran the Barack Obama Twitter handle, which I think was probably most susceptible to really embarrassing and silly mistakes. We didn’t ever really have one, which I still can’t believe we pulled off.
Was it pretty much constant terror?
It was choosing people for the team who not only were creative — and knew their social media shit — but were really kind of fanatical about fact checking and accuracy. It was getting people that understood there had to be serious fear of God before posting anything. It got to be exhausting, but I’m really proud we avoided a really embarrassing “Amercia” situation.
Did you have any close calls?
Not anything too terrible but just embarrassing typos. But not anything as bad as Amercia. Because that’s pretty damn bad.
Do you think Republicans are more tone deaf when it comes to social media than Democrats?
I think they’re a little more tone deaf generally, but I’m sure there are people that get it. I think one of the great things about our campaign is that they recognized that digital was going to be a huge part of it. They put a lot of trust in my boss, [Obama for America Digital Director] Teddy Goff, and he in turn put a lot of trust in us, that we knew what we were doing, and to follow our gut, they just need to be brave enough to just let people who know their shit do what they do. But I’m perfectly content if they don’t figure that out for a while.
How did you guys decide what voice to speak in? Was it more casual than real life?
One thing I was really proud of was we always tried to be really human, like speak to people like we’d like to be spoken to, and never go into, you know, “speechiness.” We actually had a list of banned words — like, don’t use words that only politicians use in speeches, don’t be a douchebag, stuff like that.
It was nice to see you guys embrace the GIF on Tumblr. Was that a conscious decision?
We recognized early on that when we put up a GIF or reblogged a GIF it would have a better reach than just a static image. It’s just another way to speak in the terms of the community — and make things more fun. This isn’t rocket science at all, but I think something that we discovered — or tried to implement — was that if you put things in terms that people actually want to share, they will share them. Political campaigns historically haven’t totally gotten it.
Tell me what election night was like for your team.
The digital campaign was divided into people who were responsible for putting out planned content — so, like, find your polling place — and a rapid-response team. We also did targeted posts and tweets encouraging people to stay in line, getting out information where their new polling place was, stuff like that. We actually went through a few dry runs in the weeks before election day to make sure that we had that entire process down.
And how’d the Four More Years photo come about?
We’d all been there since 4am or 6am, we’re exhausted, I refused to believe that we were actually winning, but we started thinking, around 8:30 or 9:00, “What do we do next?” One of my team members remembered an amazing photo of the president and first lady hugging at the president’s last campaign rally in Des Moines. It’s this really beautiful photo at night — the only thing was that Michelle was facing forward and the president was facing away from the camera, So my boss, Teddy Goff, made the very good point that we should see the president’s face. I remembered that our campaign photographer had taken a series of really great hug photographs at another Iowa rally, in the summer, and I went to our photo editor and she was like “Yes!” She found the photo, I wrote a couple captions, we went with “Four more years,” they called Iowa, I hit post, and then I closed my laptop and we jetted to the victory party. Actually, none of us looked at how the posts were doing until I opened my laptop the next morning.
And, of course, it had exploded.
I don’t think anyone on the team had a conception that we would break every record ever, it was crazy. I think it was just a combination of the moment, and just kinda lucking into a photo that people loved that I think showed the emotion and the relief, and obviously I think everyone loves the president and the first lady together especially, so it was sort of a confluence of factors. But, uh, yeah. It worked out.
— Brian Ries is the social media editor for Newsweek/The Daily Beast, who produced this story in partnership with Tumblr Storyboard. Photo by Scout Tufankjian for Obama for America.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdq33rdD8m1rrpm57o1_r1_1280.jpg)
Meet the Mind Behind Barack Obama’s Online Persona
You’ve most definitely seen it by now. Michelle Obama, wearing a red-and-white checkered dress, stands with her back to the camera. Her arms are wrapped around her husband, the hints of a smile lingering on the edges of his lips. “Four more years,” reads the text, which was posted on the Obama campaign’s social media accounts around 11:15pm on election night‚ just as it became clear the president had won a second term.
The photo, taken by campaign photographer Scout Tufankjian just a few days into the job, pretty much won the internet: 816,000 retweets, the most likes ever on Facebook; thousands of reblogs on Tumblr. And yet it wasn’t chosen by the president’s press secretary, or even a senior-level operative, but by 31-year-old Laura Olin, a social media strategist who’d been up since 4am. For the first time since the campaign ended, she talked to Tumblr, in partnership with The Daily Beast, about what it’s like being the voice of the President — where millions of people, and a ravenous press, await your every grammatical error.
So how does it actually work, being the voice of the President? Who makes the decisions about what to post?
All of our decisions were made in-house — in Chicago, mostly — so we weren’t getting direct directives from the White House or anything. But we tried as much as possible to have voices for each account, so depending on the message — because we had all these channels — we had an appropriate place to put it. Obviously some stuff was sufficiently huge so that it went everywhere, but as much as possible we tried to tailor the message for the channel and the audience.
It must be daunting.
It was kind of terrifying, actually. My team ran the Barack Obama Twitter handle, which I think was probably most susceptible to really embarrassing and silly mistakes. We didn’t ever really have one, which I still can’t believe we pulled off.
Was it pretty much constant terror?
It was choosing people for the team who not only were creative — and knew their social media shit — but were really kind of fanatical about fact checking and accuracy. It was getting people that understood there had to be serious fear of God before posting anything. It got to be exhausting, but I’m really proud we avoided a really embarrassing “Amercia” situation.
Did you have any close calls?
Not anything too terrible but just embarrassing typos. But not anything as bad as Amercia. Because that’s pretty damn bad.
Do you think Republicans are more tone deaf when it comes to social media than Democrats?
I think they’re a little more tone deaf generally, but I’m sure there are people that get it. I think one of the great things about our campaign is that they recognized that digital was going to be a huge part of it. They put a lot of trust in my boss, [Obama for America Digital Director] Teddy Goff, and he in turn put a lot of trust in us, that we knew what we were doing, and to follow our gut, they just need to be brave enough to just let people who know their shit do what they do. But I’m perfectly content if they don’t figure that out for a while.
How did you guys decide what voice to speak in? Was it more casual than real life?
One thing I was really proud of was we always tried to be really human, like speak to people like we’d like to be spoken to, and never go into, you know, “speechiness.” We actually had a list of banned words — like, don’t use words that only politicians use in speeches, don’t be a douchebag, stuff like that.
It was nice to see you guys embrace the GIF on Tumblr. Was that a conscious decision?
We recognized early on that when we put up a GIF or reblogged a GIF it would have a better reach than just a static image. It’s just another way to speak in the terms of the community — and make things more fun. This isn’t rocket science at all, but I think something that we discovered — or tried to implement — was that if you put things in terms that people actually want to share, they will share them. Political campaigns historically haven’t totally gotten it.
Tell me what election night was like for your team.
The digital campaign was divided into people who were responsible for putting out planned content — so, like, find your polling place — and a rapid-response team. We also did targeted posts and tweets encouraging people to stay in line, getting out information where their new polling place was, stuff like that. We actually went through a few dry runs in the weeks before election day to make sure that we had that entire process down.
And how’d the Four More Years photo come about?
We’d all been there since 4am or 6am, we’re exhausted, I refused to believe that we were actually winning, but we started thinking, around 8:30 or 9:00, “What do we do next?” One of my team members remembered an amazing photo of the president and first lady hugging at the president’s last campaign rally in Des Moines. It’s this really beautiful photo at night — the only thing was that Michelle was facing forward and the president was facing away from the camera, So my boss, Teddy Goff, made the very good point that we should see the president’s face. I remembered that our campaign photographer had taken a series of really great hug photographs at another Iowa rally, in the summer, and I went to our photo editor and she was like “Yes!” She found the photo, I wrote a couple captions, we went with “Four more years,” they called Iowa, I hit post, and then I closed my laptop and we jetted to the victory party. Actually, none of us looked at how the posts were doing until I opened my laptop the next morning.
And, of course, it had exploded.
I don’t think anyone on the team had a conception that we would break every record ever, it was crazy. I think it was just a combination of the moment, and just kinda lucking into a photo that people loved that I think showed the emotion and the relief, and obviously I think everyone loves the president and the first lady together especially, so it was sort of a confluence of factors. But, uh, yeah. It worked out.
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Man Bartlett, Social Media Artist
If the role of the artist is to respond to the society and the times they live in, Man Bartlett is probably on the right track. The young Brooklyn-based artist carries out much of his work through social media platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook. These days, we spend a lot of our lives on our computers or smartphones, and we interact more and more through social networks. But precisely because the changes associated with these new technologies are so widespread, it is difficult to judge what impact they have had on our lives and psyches. That’s where art comes in.
Through his virtual projects, performances, and lively online interventions, Bartlett acts as a critical voice, provoking his audience into rethinking how they engage with their favorite websites. He is also a leading practitioner of what has come to be known as “social media art,” a genre which gathered some momentum in recent years with Hyperallergic editor Hrag Vartanian’s 2010 exhibition “The Social Graph” and a comprehensive feature in ARTnews magazine as well as countless articles and essays.
Social media art, according to Bartlett, “uses social media as a function of its existence,” taking advantage of the possibilities of the online social space but also pushing its boundaries. For “The Social Graph,” social media artist An Xiao performed “The Artist is (Kinda) Present,” a riff on performance artist Marina Abramovic’s piece of a similar name in which Xiao interacted with her audience solely through Twitter while sitting across from them. For his part, Bartlett has turned New York’s Port Authority bus station into a platform for an interactive online experience with #24hPort, translated tweets into sculpture with “Kith and Kin,” and documented himself spending a full 140 hours in a Berlin gallery wrapped in an American flag and hanging out with a turkey — a riff on German artist Joseph Beuys’s famous piece “I Like America and America Likes Me” — on his Tumblr with #140hBerlin.
For such a technology-savvy artist, Bartlett’s studio in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood is remarkably low-tech. Wide windows overlooking the industrial landscape cast light on collections of vintage magazines, a massive minimalist drawing in progress, and an incense burner turned into an altar for used-up pens. The flip side of Bartlett’s digital creative process is that he continues to get his hands dirty, making collages out of travel ads clipped from ‘60s lifestyle periodicals that reflect on the presence of technology in culture.
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Lady Comics: Who Needs Late Night? We’ve Got Tumblr
If you ask a female comedian how social media has impacted her professional life, she will likely respond like Elaine Carroll. “Social media has made my career,” says Carroll, the 30-year-old creator of the Very Mary Kate web series, a spoof of Mary Kate Olsen’s glam life in New York.
Remember just a few years back, when comedians (of any gender) relentlessly chased guest spots at the feet of David Letterman and Jay Leno? Getting a gig on late night was the ultimate career boost, but women comedians had to fight through the prejudices both professional (like infamously misogynist Letterman booker Eddie Brill) and cultural (let’s all try to forget that Christopher Hitchens essay).
But the level playing field of Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr means no one gets between ambitious talent and a potentially receptive audience. All it takes is perseverance, ability, skill, and infinite patience.
“Social media has essentially become my career,” says Kate Spencer, an improv instructor and writer at VH1 who blogs on Tumblr.
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