Follower Counts don’t Count

On the April 23rd episode of Pod Save America, Dan Pfeiffer asked me a question about how Vice President Joe Biden can overcome President Trump’s structural advantages online. We had a good discussion about the systemic advantages to outrage content but there was a separate point that I’ve been mulling over since.

I was reminded of this when reading this April 25th New York Times story about the Biden campaign during the pandemic. The authors write:

At times, Mr. Biden has appeared out of his comfort zone and he continues to express a kind of chuckling disbelief that his basement has become a makeshift studio. Advisers acknowledge that they have considerable catching up to do on sites like Facebook and YouTube.

There is a similar note in this great Kevin Roose New York Times story from April 16th:

He lacks the social media firepower of Mr. Trump, whose 106 million combined followers on Facebook and Twitter dwarf Mr. Biden’s 6.7 million, and whose White House coronavirus briefings have allowed him to commandeer the news cycle. Mr. Biden’s first virtual town hall last month was marred by technical problems, and some of his other digital experiments — like a soporific campaign podcast, “Here’s the Deal,” which did not rank among the top 100 podcasts on Apple Podcasts as of this week — have not gone as well as hoped.

At the heart of both of these quotes is a miscalculation in digital strategy and I want to focus on just that one point in this piece. Specifically, the Biden campaign should not be overly focused on growing their own social media channels and instead embrace a distributed strategy online that mirrors their approach with local media.

Why not worry about follower counts?

First and most simply, they’ll never make up the distance. Vice President Biden has not valued or used his own online channels as his primary means of reaching people during the campaign. Trump’s online presence is intrinsically tied to not just his communications strategy but his identity as a politician. The Biden campaign won’t catch the Trump juggernaut, and, yes, progress can be made but why accept a scoreboard you can’t win.

But more importantly, focusing on owned and operated channel metrics misses the question of what strategic goal is served by having those channels. Each platform serves a different purpose: Twitter allows you to write your own headline, YouTube allows you to program content to your subscribers on your own schedule. But in all cases—and especially with Instagram, YouTube and Facebook—you are in the first instance talking to your fans when you push content on your own channels. It gives you a great opportunity to do brand advertising; that is, remind people of the qualities of your candidacy that made people supporters to begin with. And it’s a place to make asks of your audience. But it is less effective for the persuasion of undecideds. By definition, if they are undecided why would they be fans of your Facebook page or subscribers to your YouTube channel. Yes, content on those channels reaches non-fans and that matters. But you can be more targeted in choosing which pieces reach which audiences through a distributed strategy.

What is a distributed strategy?

The Biden campaign already knows what this looks like because they are doing it right now; just not for digital. In a April 22nd Washington Post story about how the Biden campaign is relying on local and late night TV to counter-program the Trump press briefing, deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield has the following quote:

Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, said local television has “been a cornerstone of our media strategy.”

“People put tremendous faith in their hometown outlets, and we always want to meet people where they are,” Bedingfield said in a statement to The Post. “Sometimes that means bypassing the national media narrative of the day and talking to people in their own backyards.”

The other huge advantage with local news is that you know demographically who you are reaching. As is stated in the same article, “The choice of outlets was obvious — Biden spoke directly to audiences in the three usually Democratic states that Trump breached when he won the 2016 election.”

The Biden campaign should take the same approach with digital. They should identify the demographics of the audiences they want to reach and then make Vice President Biden available to those channels for interviews or other content products. Finding these channels sounds tricky but can actually be done programatically. A specific and timely example from our work in the Obama White House: the 2015–2016 Zika crisis. We knew that mothers and soon-to-be moms would be very concerned about getting accurate information on this disease so we identified popular parenting groups on Facebook where we made available White House health experts to answer questions. Not only does the content reach an audience who won’t be subscribed to the White House (or even Barack Obama’s) Facebook page. The information is more trusted by the audience because it is being delivered through a channel they already know.

To be even more concrete, I encourage the Biden campaign to work with Civis Analytics to both define these demographics and identify the influencers they could collaborate with online.

What does it look like?

The Biden team should be more flexible both in terms of what the end product looks like and what channels are used. And they should be more specific in terms of how this content feels. During the pandemic, the types of online content we’ve seen perform well are those that feel raw and vulnerable. People are looking for content that has a feeling of intimacy.

Politics often fetishizes the “proven play” and there aren’t as many proven plays for how to campaign during a pandemic. You are going to have to take risks and try things, some of which will fail. This also means allocating more of the Vice President’s time to these endeavors. Some existing comms plays can be repurposed; you can try pushing out the clips from the local news (better if you are pushing the content from the accounts of the news channel rather than on your own channels) and you can try to clip out the good parts of Zoom calls. But you’re going to have to spend more time partnering with new digital channels to make content just for them for this to be successful.

Do we really have to do all this?

A frequent argument I’ve both heard and read in response to “The Biden campaign needs to do a better job online” is: Yeah, but he won the primary without this stuff.

And this is obviously true but three points in response:

First, the Biden campaign knows they will need to perform better with younger voters than they did in the primary and those voters are more online than the older base he carried.

Second, theres is a pandemic and you can’t go outside and traditional campaigning is paused and in doubt for the rest of the cycle

And finally, because of the pandemic, the contest has still not moved to the one-on-one phase. The Biden campaign needs to be working right now to seed antibodies online against the avalanche of bullshit and disinformation that will come from the Trump campaign. One of the best ways to do so is reach additional audiences through a distributed online strategy.

Do it now.

Good digital strategy is not about having clever people who have smart ideas about how to make things go viral online. That’s fun too. But ultimately it doesn’t really matter if you get out the well-timed dunk tweet. The number of retweets doesn’t matter. The number of followers doesn’t matter. The qualities that made Joe Biden the nominee; his empathy, his ability to console, his proven ability to lead, are what will make him the perfect counter balance to Trump and win him the Presidency. But not without more emphasis on demonstrating those qualities through all the means available.