Dear Mr Socrates: Social Media is not renowned for this type of miracle

José Socrates

After David Plouffe’s (Obama’s campaign manager) paid visit to a closed invitation only seminar, for the political class, it was obvious that someone would end up buying into the much sought after success that Blue State Digital pulled off in the Obama Campaign for the American Presidency.

The most likely candidate was our Prime Minister José Socrates. However, somewhere along the line, someone forgot to mention that Obama’s campaign was not won merely on BSD’s technical merit but instead on the campaign management team’s ability to wholly integrate traditional with non traditional media whilst capitalising on Obama’s unique traits as an outstanding speaker, motivator, and visionary with a past envious of most politicians – that and the uniqueness of being the first Afro-American to run for president.

David Plouffe has always made a point of identifying the core feature of the campaign’s success – Obama himself, who had a unique and inspiring connection with the American public and who’s personal traits will be impossible to copy (authenticity is one of the most difficult of things to duplicate).

Jose Socrates unfortunately has very few of those traits, not to mention the fact that his past seems to shadow him where ever he goes, leaving a trail of unanswered accusations that to all effects will be presumed as true by the audience. A simple comparison on Wikipedia between José Socrates and Barack Obama (even the search on the word controversy finds only one, albeit seemingly irrelevant, occurrence) spells out the task at hand – not easy.

This is exacerbated by his erratic presence online, either through the reclaimed twitter account that is now dormant (no doubt awaiting instructions from the experts), his outdated blog (last entry in 2005) that sits at number one on Google search for “jose Socrates blog” or his now “new start” entitled socrates2009.pt which, like much of his politics, is still under construction.

Even if, by some miracle, BDS manages to erase Socrates’ past, update the present and mould his future, they will have a larger task at hand – dealing with the much smaller yet highly active digital arena in Portugal. Whereby Obama made use of the long tail of fund raising, with an average of 89 USD per person, Socrates is already being publically questioned as to who will foot the bill for BSD, let alone any chance of those active on the web contributing in mass to his cause.

It will be interesting to see the use of Hi5, a platform that did not feature in the Obama campaign, probably owing to its low penetration in the States, but also owing to lack of tools that Facebook has developed to enable large scale collaboration. Hi5 is the largest and one of the most active communities on the web for the Portuguese community.

Those who are highly active online will inadvertently have more to say about what isn’t said, than that which is pitched through the Socrates campaign machine. One thing is for sure, the result for Socrates, will be rich demographic and psychographic data never before collected and treated on this scale. Again though, what use is data if the product you are marketing is below par?

Personally, if I was Socrates, I would not have invested on BDS but instead on Obama – however absurd and highly unlikely that you would be able to buy Obama’s services as himself as candidate, I can’t help but think that the odds would be better. Socrates does have the advantage in the lack of competition from his adversaries, however you never know if the tables will turn and in who’s favour.

Gentlemen, let the conversation begin!