Daedalus: Technological Triumps and Challenges

Latching onto the long tail of politics
Andy Ho, Straits Times 22 Mar 08;

IF 20 PER CENT of the electorate are making 80 per cent of the noise, how do politicians connect with the other 80 per cent?

In the old days, politicians relied on broadcasting through the dailies and the TV. Then came the Internet. But that turned out to be narrowcast, drawing the eyeballs of the already converted. So the 80 per cent still remained out of reach.

Until YouTube. Born in February 2005, the first YouTube election occurred, arguably, over a year later. In mid-August 2006, there was a YouTube video of Virginia's Republican Senator George Allen repeatedly calling a rival's campaign worker a macaca (a species of monkey). Seen by millions - in geekspeak, it went viral - the racial slur cost Mr Allen his Senate seat and, with it, his presidential aspirations.

The campaign operative who captured that mean-spirited moment was an Indian named S.R. Sidarth who wore a mullet. This hairstyle is short on the sides, front and top, with a long tail at the back.

Fast-forward to 2008: Senator Barack Obama may be riding the long tail of politics into the White House.

We know the 80/20 rule of thumb: For example, 20 per cent of workers do 80 per cent of the work. Also, 80 per cent of music or book sales derive from 20 per cent of all songs recorded or books penned - the smash hits or blockbusters. But this leaves 80 per cent - the long tail - of music or books not profitably marketed.

Until now, that is: On the Internet, one can build an e-business model to monetise the long tail and make it profitable - as Amazon and e-Bay have done.

Now map that idea onto politics. Of the US$32 million (S$44 million) Mr Obama raised in January, some US$28 million came from over a million small donors via the Internet. In fact, 40 per cent gave US$25 or less, with 10,000 donors giving just US$5 to US$10 each. Not only are campaign donors more likely to volunteer time and actually vote, but they are also likely to get family and friends involved as well.

But even an Obama could not have achieved such results before 2005. The Internet then consisted of largely isolated, static websites offering little more than text and podcasts. If you streamed video on these sites, the more visitors you had, the slower your video would run, with system crash a distinct possibility.

Now, given YouTube's acres of server farms, literally millions can watch at the same time. You can even 'paste' YouTube videos on your own site and they will run off YouTube's servers, not your ISP's, so a crash is unlikely. The opposition in Malaysia adopted this strategy in the country's recent general election with devastating effect.

Besides watching videos, you can also upload anything you shoot - using a camera phone, say - on to YouTube. You can comment on posted videos. Potentially, millions could see, hear or read your opinions.

People also tag their videos with search words and users can collaborate to group such tags together in a 'tag cloud'. In these clouds, the more important tags have bigger fonts, so there is a taxonomy of sorts ('folksonomy') to facilitate video searches.

You can also create a channel with others to upload videos on a specific subject. The three US presidential candidates have their own 'YouChoose' channel where they can talk to users through video clips while viewers can respond with their own videos. Channel subscribers are alerted when a new video with a specified tag appears.

It makes sense politically to study what issues young people are talking about on the homemade videos they post on YouTube. It pays to identify the videos that get the most views because they have been recommended to others by online users. By such monitoring, the Obama campaign has been able to make sure the message it gets out is one that the crowd can identify with.

This is marketing with a twist. A generation that has humbled the music industry with peer-to-peer music sharing wants to own the message that it receives. It prefers Mr Obama's 'yes we can' to Mrs Hillary Clinton's 'experience from day one', which seems to them to say 'only I can'.

The Obama campaign also uses sophisticated microtargeting tools to tailor campaign material to each voter in the long tail. A modelling software called Catalist can predict which issues matter most to a particular voter so he or she can be sent an individually tailored message.

The other main prong of the Obama long-tail strategy is a less well known wiki- based social software called Central Desktop. (By creating a collaborative social network, the wiki has, famously, enabled individuals to jointly develop Wikipedia.) Volunteers don't have to be geeks to use this egalitarian platform to collaboratively organise information.

After they have knocked on doors, they enter information into the system - which households are supporters, who will volunteer, and so on. This helped the Obama campaign take off quickly in large states like Ohio and Texas where it had no pre-existing infrastructure. Volunteers also use Central Desktop to organise and publicise offline events so people can network in the flesh too.

The biggest hurdle in politics is organising the like-minded. If social software can ride the long tail to organise spontaneous networks of interaction, a revolution in political organising would have been effected. Social software not only facilitates the exchange of video content but also helps people to keep in touch and coordinate their actions.

Facebook will soon launch an instant messaging service built into its user pages so friends can video web chat directly. This year high-definition YouTube will become available. Social networking will continue to improve and threaten traditional modes of political organisation, for it would allow for organising without organisations. You no longer need to get people together at the same time, same place.

But none of this means politics has now become easy. Mr Obama's young staffers pounded the streets, made contacts, built databases, and created a social network from the ground up. The door-to- door work still needs to be done.

The long tail is not a magical arena. Campaigns still need the soaring oratory of an Obama - or an Anwar Ibrahim - to fire up the base. They still need a charismatic leader to hold things together.

Even the long tail can't wag the dog at will.