Obama’s Social Media Digital Dream Team came to CU’s ATLAS center and spoke on “How Technology, Social Networking and Analytics Helped Secure a Presidential Reelection. Regardless of your politics, you have to admit what they did reshaped the engagement landscape.
The panel included:
- Chris Gansen, Engineering Lead, Dashboard, @cgansen
- Jason Kunesh, Director of User Experience and Product, @jdkunesh
- Dylan Richard, Director of Engineering, @dylanr
The intense passion and brainpower were inspiring; I’d love to work with any of those guys. Here’re a few tweets to get a flavor of the conversation:
- Engineer recruiting pitch “this is going to be the worst job you’ve had” and “you have a chance to impact history”
- Pitch to potential volunteers – “How wd you like to work for the President”?
- When people are running w hair on fire – “slow is smooth, smooth is fast”
- Can have tons of data but it’s nothing w/out a clear, concise way to tell the story.
- Engineers learned most fm “making it fail” game day. How things actually failed was different than how we thought they wd fail.
- Everyone is an expert at something you just need to find out what it is.
I was fascinated by the nothing-BIG SOMETHING-nothing quality of their experience. Basically they started at zero and then cranked for 18 months. During that time they created 200 apps, among other things. Then, whoosh, it all spiraled down the drain the moment the election was over.
As you can imagine, this dynamic presents all sorts of interesting individual and team performance considerations. Jason talked about establishing culture starting from scratch. He described an iterative process of sharing Story of Self to create that bond:
- Meet with a colleague.
- Share a personal Challenge, Choice and Outcome.
- Notice what we have in common.
- Now we have a Story of Us.
- Find another colleague and repeat.
Elegant. Simple. Profound.
(Also on my mind: DailyDebriefApp, created in conjunction with @spikex, is now available in iTunes. Check it out on Facebook )
