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The Message Is the Medium: Learning from Obama’s Ubiquity

J. K. Glei Editor-in-Chief, 99%, Behance Recent Posts

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August 7, 2009

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In an August cover story, New York magazine takes a look at Obama not just as president but as “content provider.” For anyone interested in how to push their message both online and off, Obama is, thus far, a highly instructive case study.

Obama’s election proved the power of branding, design, and new media. And his presidency is proving that the old model of content dissemination has been flipped on its head by the predominance of social media and infinite shareability.

In an information-overloaded era, “less is more” has gone out the window, and “more is more” – à la Obama’s “blitzkrieg” communications approach – has the upper hand.

Just a few of the article’s takeaways:

1. Keep moving & keep producing.
“Danah Boyd, a social-media expert at Microsoft Research, notes that the president’s like any blogger or Internet content provider. She’s constantly asked the question: How do I maintain my reputation when this stupid thing I did/wrote/said keeps resurfacing online? ‘And the advice I give,’ she says, ‘is to keep producing.’”

2. When in doubt, publish. Then filter.
“Sound bites, says Clay Shirky, the NYU new-media philosopher and recent author of Here Comes Everybody, were a product of media scarcity, when public figures had a finite amount of time and space to make their points. Now we live in a world of ‘Publish, then filter,’ he points out, rather than ‘Filter, then publish,’ a time when the question is ‘Why not film this?’ rather than ‘Why film this?’”

3. Skip the mainstream media, and control the conversation.
“Obama lives in a moment when he can finally do what his modern predecessors only dreamed of: go directly over the heads of the mainstream press. The White House Flickr stream is a good example. Since the beginning of his presidency, the Obama press office has uploaded 983 pictures onto the site. Each is as perfectly composed as an old cover of Life magazine, and each competes with, if not trumps, a photograph taken during a routine photo op, which probably explains why the administration denied outside photographers access to the Oval Office on the president’s first day in office and released its own pictures instead. Why leave such an important image to chance if it’s something you can control?”

Read the full article here.

*** This article is based on the research and writing of J.K. Glei. She regularly collaborates with Scott Belsky and the Behance Team, who run the Behance Creative Network, the Action Method project management application, and the Creative Jobs List.