I’ve asked here in much earlier posts if President Obama is grossly overexposed. Contrary to the Reagan Method, Obama seems to be always “stepping on his message.”
In the days of the Great Communicator, the administration always had one clear message of the day or the week, reinforced by Michael Deaver’s imagery and the speechwriters soaring prose. Given only a few seconds of unfiltered time with the American people, Ronald Reagan had to do this–underscore his message with a big visual and compelling soundbite.
An insightful piece by Jennifer Senior in New York magazine argues that Obama is pioneering a radical new approach enabled by the multiplatform nature of the Internet.
She shows how Barack Obama in short order orchestrates radio, op-eds, YouTube posts, Twitters, interviews and speeches to sell the same message using different language in different formats for differing slices of the American public. What has changed since the Reagan era? That was an age of media scarcity. This is an age in which more media expands the public’s appetite for more access.
Senior also argues that with YouTube, a president today can afford to give a deep and complex policy speech, knowing that the Internet can now aggregate a large enough audience to justify the effort.
Finally, she offers advice that any executive should keep in mind. Senior quotes Danah Boyd, a social-media expert at Microsoft. How do I maintain my reputation when this stupid thing I did/wrote/said keeps resurfacing online? Any reader of Groundswell knows that trying to suppress a nasty post will, like blowing on a dandelion, only spread it (the so-called Streisand Effect.)
The answer, Boyd tells Senior, is keep producing. If you can’t suppress it, bury it.
