How Will A Successful Obama Campaign Change the Way Washington Operates in 2009?

[This originally appeared at PRNewsOnline.com on June 19, 2008]

By Jeff Connaughton & Shabbir Imber Safdar

If Barack Obama and his grassroots army win the White House in November, he has promised to change the way business is done in Washington.  Some of the implications such as earmark reform, more transparency in contracting and lobbying, and campaign finance changes, are stated plainly on his “Ethics Issues” page.

Yet, in a larger sense, legions of advocates will be trying to make sense of what it means to influence policy-making in Washington when the person just elected to the highest office in the land won with an army of small donors and volunteers and without contributions from lobbyists.  Indeed, while castigating the outsized influence of lobbyists in the process.

Will the Obama administration return K Street’s calls?  Perhaps not as quickly or with as much interest as previously has been the case.  Instead, companies need to reorient their thinking to fit the new paradigm.

The most obvious implication will be changes in the way the White House governs.    With promises of more open White House communication, and an army of supporters still connected by e-mail, an Obama administration may rely far less on the mainstream press to get their message out or to set the context of a story.  As in the handling the Rev. Wright episode, candidate Obama has shown that he can make one public speech, post it online, and fundamentally change the dynamic of the news cycle by the effect of bloggers and thousands of commentaries online.

Working inside this dynamic will be difficult without matching the same tactics.  While it’s unlikely any industry or interest will be able to raise a similar army of supporters, the same level of openness and commitment to monitoring and participating in online discussions will be critical.  Issue groups must be developed by providing supportive evidence for one’s case directly to the public through online communications channels.

While still valuable, spinning the evening news anchor or the major print story will become marginally less effective.  Earlier this year, a survey from iFOCOS found that half of all Americans are getting their news from the Internet.  While the sources they may find online are the Web portals of traditional media outlets, pundits and bloggers usually outnumber traditional media outlets online and can promote or bury a story within hours.

Our specific recommendations for operating in this environment in 2009 include:

1. Begin a program to monitor online conversations about your issues in the same way that you currently monitor press clips.  When you need to enter the debate, you’ll understand the “map of influence” around your issues online.
2. Prepare your government affairs and communications teams to take their case directly to the public online.  Experiment now so that you’re not confronting the logistical issues of speaking online while you’re simultaneously dealing with a policy or public relations problem.
3. Force yourself to act daily to grow the “issue community” you’ve developed online and offline, identify and targeting additional interested persons and allies so that you can mobilize them as effectively as possible when needed.