Teddy Goff: Want to Get a President Elected? Don't Be Lame.

Before Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he first had to win the so-called "Carville primary" in 1991. The reward for winning this behind-the-scenes contest was the services of the hottest political consultant at the time, James Carville. "The equivalent this time might be the Teddy Goff primary," writes Al Hunt on Bloomberg, "to earn the assistance of the digital wunderkind who directed social media for the Obama campaign."

Goff's online exploits are legendary. In 2012, he raised over $500 million, registered more than a million voters, built a Facebook page with 45 million fans and a Twitter following of 33 million. Shall we go on? Over 100 million video views, signing up hundreds of thousands of volunteers online - it's fair to say Goff is in the right business. Or is he?

Of course, Goff's man was re-elected, partly on the strength of the most impressive online fundraising, organizing and communications campaign in the history of politics. And yet, the strategy that Goff devised, and the tools he used to implement it, is broadly transferable.

For instance, how do you get a million and a half people to read a blog post on tax policy? That seems like a tall order. How can tax policy compete with LOL cat videos? As Goff tells Big Think, you are dealing with consumers "who can click away as soon as they don't like what they're seeing." So Goff and his team relied on a simple mantra: don't be lame.

Not being lame is easier said than done, especially when you're dealing with a subject that is potentially very dull. However, a little bit of fun can go a long way. A talented digital strategist like Goff sees the Internet not as a marketing challenge, but an opportunity. A traditional campaign might have drafted a white paper or quoted a number of economists who were critical of Romney's plan. And that might have fit very well in a newspaper ad. But Goff had other ideas.

In the video, Goff tells Big Think how he developed a faux-Romney campaign website that promised potential voters details on the Romney tax plan. However, when you attempted to click a button labeled "GET THE DETAILS," the button moved out of the way of your cursor, as if to dodge the question. After eight seconds of frustration you were finally redirected to a DNC blog post that eviscerated Romney's tax plan.

As it turns out, people loved it. Goff's meme garnered over 1.5 million Facebook likes within a day. "It was content that just simply couldn't have existed before the Internet," he says.

Transcript-- I was the Digital Director for President Obama's 2012 campaign. For us and different companies structure digital and technology and all those fields a little differently. For us, digital meant everything user facing, everything that you could actually touch and read and watch and play with online. So we didn't do the back end infrastructure and most of the coding, but we did -- we had all the writers, the designers, video folks, people doing content and creative strategy.

When it came to communication, I mean, we had a sort of a three word strategy that was really quite simple which is don't be lame. And it's funny, you know, when you talk to corporate marketers, when you talk to people who have been doing PR for a long time, they will themselves acknowledge not being lame has never really been their M.O. because they're sort of well versed in risk mitigation. They're well versed in how not to annoy stakeholders or create problems. But they've never had to actually deal with consumers who can click away as soon as they don't like what they're seeing. And making sure that what they're serving those consumers with is something that they like.

Obviously that content has to have a purpose. It has to have a message but the consumer doesn't even get to the point of absorbing the message if first and foremost they think, "Well, this is dull." And so the most important thing we try to do when it came to communication was just be interesting.

I think a great example is -- it came from around, let's see it would have been October of 2012. So toward the very end of the campaign. At that point we were arguing over tax policy a lot and our argument was that Governor Romney's tax plan didn't add up. It was, from our point of view, a giveaway to millionaires and billionaires, it wasn't paid for and he never really explained how it wouldn't explode the deficit. And so we wanted to get at that but we didn't want to do just a policy white paper or a statement from an economist or something of that nature.' [Rest of transcript: http://bigthink.com/videos/dont-be-lame]

Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd