Obama campaign manager talks new media

According to Obama's website, the CTO's role will be to "ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century."

It's not surprising that Obama plans a major emphasis on technology. His presidential campaign relied heavily on the latest forms of communication -- like Internet social networking sites and text-messaging -- to organize volunteers, raise funds and get voters to the polls.

Scott Goodstein, a Washington, D.C.-based campaign manager, ran all of the text-messaging and mobile communications for the president-elect's campaign. The Ticket recently talked to him in detail about the campaign's new-media strategy.

Here are excerpts from the Q&A:

What was your role in the Obama campaign?

I got involved in February 2007. I had been running a public relations consulting business out of D.C., and I basically closed it and moved to Chicago so that I could help Sen. Obama in the primaries.

I had been working for a bunch of antiwar causes and I really felt that Obama was the strongest, clearest voice against the war. I felt he was going to be the best candidate for me and my friends.

When you first got to Chicago, what was the vision for how technology would be used in the campaign?

We were creating both internal online organizing and external organizing. So while we were building out our own social network and tools, I was working on building out our Facebook, MySpace and YouTube pages and about a dozen or so other very specific social networks.

What is the difference between internal online organizing and external organizing?

We like to say that internal organizing is building your own shopping mall and external organizing is campaigning in shopping malls that already exist.

The problem with MySpace or Facebook (which are examples of external organizing) is that you as a campaign don't own all of the data. You may not have the person's e-mail address or you may not have the person's phone number -- if the person opts out of that social network, you have no way of getting in touch with them. But they are useful because there are hundreds of millions of people that use these social networks as a daily part of their life.

Was a lot of what you were doing data-driven?