Microlistening

Obama is, admittedly, way ahead of the game in terms of campaign technology. Bloomberg looks at Obama’s latest gambit in the technology field – microlistening.

It’s the equivalent of your supporters in a local campaign telling you what’s going on with specific neighbors so you know how to adjust your voter and fundraising list – the goal is to mind for donors and swing voters.

St. Clair and his team are creating tools to connect with people properly. For example, disenchanted voters are wooed, not hit up for money. They call it microlistening.

O’Reilly coined the term microlistening when he met with campaign officials and heard what they were trying to do. They are parsing constituent concerns in fine detail. It’s easy to generate a lot of data and miss the point so, if done right, the work is more valuable than any poll, strategists say.

It comes down to data — collecting voter information, synthesizing it and making use of it most effectively. The data comes from conversations on the ground and behavioral patterns on the website. Analysts may try to determine how to best target a voter who gives $5 to participate in a raffle to have dinner with the president versus $5 during a Republican debate.

If a supporter tells the campaign that a neighbor who voted for Obama in 2008, lost his job, is frustrated with the president’s handling of the economy and is now undecided, the most important distillation of that information may be that sending someone out to ask for a donation could cost Obama that vote.

Here’s the drawback though – it may be for nothing if the economy tanks:

To be sure, no amount of technological sophistication may be enough for Obama to overcome stubbornly high unemployment, which his administration forecasts will be above 8 percent next year. Since World War II, no U.S. president has won re-election with a jobless rate above 6 percent, with the exception of Ronald Reagan, who faced 7.2 percent unemployment on Election Day in 1984.