When the mid-term elections were starting, the big money was on Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama was seen as fighting an uphill battle; Clinton was raising immense sums of money and lining up powerful supporters. She had a seasoned team of consultants skilled at manipulating the media. Most pundits predicted the Clintons would be back in the White House.Then along came an unknown 25-year-old called Chris Hughes. He grew up in Hickory, North Carolina, the only child of parents of modest means. Because of his intuitive curiosity and new media acumen, Hughes helped create one of the most targeted and successful start-ups in modern history - Barack Obama's run for presidency.
Hughes' intellect was not his only major asset. He also had the uncanny ability of being in the right place at the right time. What forces saw Hughes become a rising star in the Democratic Party? First and foremost was his chance meeting with Mark Zuckerberg, a then 19-year-old fellow Harvard student who was had created a little known online campus network called Facebook.
Hughes saw a phenomenal opportunity to test some of his social media theories about on-line behavior. Known as the "Empath" amongst his fellow scholars, Hughes became the official Facebook proponent for the Obama team.
In the fall of 2006, with midterm elections approaching, Facebook offered political candidates the opportunity to set up mini-profile to appeal to non-traditional voters. Opportunity struck again, when the freshman senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, known for his community organizing skills, came calling and Hughes accepted the invitation.
As director of on-line organizing, Hughes' technical savvy gave the Obama team an amazing head start in the campaign. Hitting the ground running, Hughes became a "miner" of human behavior data that he salted into online systems, creating an historic campaign that was able to access the most robust set of Web-based social-networking tools ever used in a political campaign history.
This community-based system enabled and energized citizens to turn themselves into online activists; long before a single Obama field staffer was able to interact with potential voters face-to-face.
"Technology has always been used as a net to capture people in a campaign or cause, but not to organize," says Obama campaign manager David Plouffe. "Chris Hughes saw what was possible before anyone else." Hughes built something the candidate said he wanted but didn't yet know was possible: a virtual mechanism for scaling and supporting community action. Then that community turned around and elected his boss president.
Hughes seized on the new Internet media to guide Obama's course into waters that were new to the candidate, but more importantly were under utilized by the Clinton and John McCain campaigns.
Hughes' key web tool was My.BarackObama.com, or MyBO for short, an intuitive and fun-to-use networking Internet site that allowed Obama supporters to create groups, plan events, raise funds, download tools, and connect with one another -- not unlike a more focused, activist Facebook.
MyBO also let the campaign reach its most passionate supporters cheaply and effectively. By the time the campaign was over, volunteers had created more than 3.2 million Facebook profiles on the site, planned 200,000 offline events, formed 35,000 groups, posted 400,000 blogs, generated 14.5 million television viewing hours on YouTube and raised $30 million on 70,000 personal fund-raising pages.
MyBarackObama.com site was the catalyst that helped turn the election tide in Obama's favor. Raising more than $500 million through average donations of under $100, in addition to mobilizing new voters, it was the major tipping point for Obama's victory.
Chris Hughes' king-making efforts paid off royally. Now, what does a king-maker do after his king ascends to the highest office in the land? In Hughes' case, he closed one chapter and opened another. On March 18, 2008, General Catalyst Partners announced that Hughes had chosen to join their venture capital team as entrepreneur-in-residence. The Cambridge, MA firm's mission is to create a new generation of digital media and social-networking start-ups and open a hi-tech corridor in the north east similar to that found in the Silicon Valley. Hughes will play a pivotal role in their success.
Who knows what the future might bring for this unlikely kingmaker. Perhaps he will be called back into service in 2016. Where will social networking be in seven years?
Photo of Chris Hughes by Steve Rhodes. CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic
