He’s the kind of guy who texts on two phones, a BlackBerry for work and a Motorola Razr for his personal use. Nowadays who doesn’t, right? However, how many of us are able to make history out of text messaging?
Scott Goodstein, is responsible for many historical text messages that will never be forgotten by the American people such as when Senator Obama chose Joe Biden as his running mate, the campaign’s mobile phone network was informed via text message at 3a.m. in the morning. Who is this guy and what special text messaging powers does he have that he was even chosen as Senator Obama’s “text-messaging” man?
The Background Story
Scott Goodstein has been involved in the field of public relations and communications his entire career. He spent the last twelve years managing political campaigns and building progressive coalitions. Goodstein understands political organising at every level of the government and has built successful statewide legislative caucuses, run congressional races, organised initiatives and assembled other unique coalitions to bring about change and build a better future. After working for several members of Congress, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, he founded Catalyst Campaigns, a public affairs firm in 2002. In February 2007 Goodstein got involved with Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign as External Online Director. He closed his public relations business and moved to Chicago so that he could help Senantor 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.” His latest venture is a company he set up in January 2009 called Revolution Messaging, LLC. Revolution Messaging has three core businesses: Social Media – social networking, search engine optimisation, and online advertising; Mobile Communication – a full scale mobile platform for SMS, MMS, IVR, WAP and mobile applications; Lifestyle marketing – How to build niche communications. The company is based in Washington, DC. Goodstein received both a BA and an MPA from The American University School of Public Affairs. Goodstein has lectured about his work at The American University, George Washington University and Columbia University. He has also spoken at The American Association of Political Consultants, Milken Institute, Personal Democracy Forum, South by Southwest and UNICEF. Goodstein loves mixing music, culture and politics.
The Obama Campaign
Goodstein was The Obama Campaign’s External Online Director. He was responsible for developing the campaign’s social networking platforms. This included launching the first niche based social networks like BlackPlanet, Eons, MiGente, AsianAve and Disaboom, a forum for the disabled. “I used each of the social networks in a unique way to assist the overall campaign’s organising efforts and message. One example would be engaging the small business community CEO’s on the business friendly social network LinkedIn. I believe this is a good example of having discussions in the right social network. In this example, the campaign was able to have a dialogue about ideas of how the US government should help small businesses with the actual experts in this field – thousands of small business owners! Senator Obama, during the campaign, was even able to call a few of the folks that gave inspiring ideas and hold a discussion with them about their thoughts on how to improve our government.” Led by Goodstein, the Obama campaign pieced that puzzle together from the start. Nearly 2 million people joined Obama’s MySpace network, but in order to more specifically target potential voters and volunteers, the campaign created 57 individual state Obama pages. Obama’s Facebook friends now number more than 3 million. Goodstein also utilised mobile marketing in the campaign. He ran all of the text-messaging and mobile communications. He created and implemented Obama Mobile, an advanced communication strategy that included text messaging, downloads, interactive voice response communication, a mobile web site (WAP), and even an iPhone application. Each state used mobile messaging to assist their local campaigns. He implemented text messaging as a way to give quick and timely updates to Obama’s base supporters and keep people connected throughout one of the longest campaigns in modern history. Text message was a great format to do this with since it allowed short messages to be delivered quickly and is easy to access at any hour of the day. “Phones are the only device with more people than the Internet,” declares Goodstein. “There is no digital divide. There is not a person in rural America that does not have a phone on them,” he adds. In fact statistics have shown that about 262 million Americans or 84 percent of the population have a mobile phone. The mobile tool proved to be practical as well. When a judge ordered the polls in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County to stay open until 9 p.m. on election night, Obama supporters were informed via text message. Diehards were encouraged to come to the county to continue helping get out the vote. Text messaging was used throughout the campaign to keep supporters up-to-date and create a feeling of ownership in the campaign among supporters. “Watch Barack debate tonight live on CNN! 7pm EDT. REPLY back with your name and your thoughts during & after the debate,” read a text sent on July 23, 2007. Two months later, on Sept. 11, a text read: “Please REPLY to this message with your five-digit zip code to receive local Obama campaign news and periodic updates.” Even though text messaging played an important role as a communication tool in the campaign, Goodstein admits that it has its limitation. “[For instance], you’re not going to be able to give out detailed healthcare information. That being said, it’s an amazing tool to send direct action alerts. And in roughly two sentences you can actually say quite a bit.” Goodstein goes on to explain the benefits of texting over phone and e-mails. “It had great impact on election day, when people may not have been on their computers. Many times in the primaries, a storm or something would happen and polls would be kept open later and we would let people know with text messages. How do you communicate that with your supporters and drive more and more people out to vote? There is now another weapon in the armoury that you can use.” Though Goodstein is a strong believer in the importance of new media and particularly mobile communication, he feels that there is no substitute for speaking directly to the people. “If I have a choice of getting out and talking to voters for 20 minutes or sitting inside and texting, I should get out. The tools are very powerful, but the game is still about your message, time, people and money.”
Project ‘Catalysts Campaigns’
Goodstein believes that politics does not happen in a vacuum but is part of the society we live in. Thus he started up the firm called Catalysts Campaigns – CatalystsCampaigns.com – and used lifestyle marketing, political communication strategies, created focused message campaigns and niche based organising to communicate a message. A master at mixing online and offline organising tools with culture, music, politics and messaging, Goodstein built many sustainable niche based organisations from the ground up including Punkvoter.com ‘Rock Against Bush’ Tours, Military Free Zone.org, Save CBGB and Operation Ceasefire. Some of the work that Goodstein carries out through his firm:
Organizational Development
Understanding how each ingredient works is how Catalyst Campaigns builds successful and sustainable organisations from scratch. They making sure that your organisation is structured to match your vision in the early days and understand the importance of both short term and long term planning and budgeting. They work with your organisation’s leadership to analyse goals and build a structure that incorporates legal, political, and economical considerations. Catalyst Campaigns has taught message-based financial planning to statewide elected officials, state Democratic parties, as well as many other types of organisations.
Message Development
Catalysts Campaigns goal is to ensure that the issue of a campaign is clearly and consistently heard. Catalyst Campaigns does not simply produce “press by the pound”. Instead, they audit each project’s internal communications system, research the different communications strategies that are being used on similar issues, analyse the strengths and weaknesses of each argument and incorporate all factors into creating a complete strategy.
Niche marketing
Catalyst Campaigns blends effective messaging strategies with lifestyle marketing techniques to increase your campaigns impact and to communicate with very specific audiences in new and unique ways. l Media relations
Combine aggressive strategies with creativity to make the message stand out. In addition they add knowledge of which they feel reporters will be interested in covering and target the best time to deliver a client’s message. Their work includes: effective print and radio ads, custom blog strategies, uniquely designed press conferences, media training, talking points, effective e-mail strategies, and guerrilla earned media campaigns.
Online and Offline Organising
Too many organisations today focus all of their efforts in one basket, either all on web strategy or all on field organising. Catalyst Campaigns experience spans more than a decade in off-line organising and six years experience organising through the Internet. They build campaign websites, market campaigns both online and offline and build off-line activities to organise around.
Philanthropic and Political Planning
From helping organisations define what their interests are to helping individuals better understand how to craft specific positions or specific action plans, Catalyst Campaigns has helped organisations plan new ways to be successful at fulfilling their mission. They helped different groups create their own unique Federal Political Action Committee, 527 organisation, and even charitable not for profit organisation depending on the group’s mission and goals.
One example of a successful campaign was for PunkVoter.com. In 2003 Scott Goodstein, partnered with punk-icon Fat Mike to build what became one of the most successful young-voter political messaging organisations in the 2004 election cycle – Punkvoter.com. This voter education organisation was a coalition of over 200 of the nation’s largest punk-rock bands, thirty independent record labels and tens of thousands of punk rock fans. The founders believe this campaign is different in that they are not simply sending young adults to the polls. Their focus and the purpose of PunkVoter.com is to get these voters to cast their ballots against President George W. Bush. In an interview with CNN in 2003 November, Mike said he is trying to harness his residual anger over the outcome of the 2000 election and his dissatisfaction with the direction of the country by mobilising punk fans around the activist principles of the “loud, fast, aggressive” and “real” music. “Bush getting elected was good for punk music,” says Mike. “Now people have something to get pissed off about!” Punkvoter.com organised over 500,000 young voters and educated millions more. Punkvoter sold over 650,000 Rock Against Bush CD/DVDs, held hundreds of Rock Against Bush concerts, and ran an over US$ 2 million paid voter education campaign in key battleground states.
The future
Goodstein urges current and future organisations to be flexible and forward thinking to build platforms necessary to communicate and engage with their customers in different ways. “The payoff on engaging in these platforms may not be noticeable in the short term – but will assist overall efforts in countless ways for the long haul.” According to Goodstein, the future of mobile is definitely growing rapidly and organisations need to spend time and resources figuring out real mobile strategies. “Cell phones have become increasingly sophisticated in the last two years and I have noticed their continued evolution since the campaign ended. People are finally becoming comfortable using their phone as a main device for news, information and commerce. Therefore, this is a unique opportunity for organisations to use this channel to engage their audience in a new and extremely personalised way. However, these lists take time to grow and need to be invested in order to see them achieve their full potential for your organisation.” When asked to predict the future of social media and mobile marketing in the next two years Goodstein was positive that there is no turning back and no stopping these two very pertinent mediums. “I believe these communication channels will continue to grow and be more and more relevant for marketing over the next two years. In the US, TV commercials are becoming harder and harder to saturate the marketplace. This is mostly because of the growth of Tivo, Hulu, DV-Rs, and other devices that make it easier for people to watch TV without commercials and at different times of the day. Therefore, I believe that social media is one place where you can still spread communications and build momentum for your organisation. The trickier part is that you need to have the right message and the right messenger in order for your campaign to be successful and viral in this space.” Scott will be in Malaysia in early June. For details email ham@adoimagazine.com