Steve Jobs Is The Mastermind Behind Obama’s Re-Election Campaign

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Like he did when he ran for President back in 2008, Obama is seriously leveraging the power of mobile in his campaign for re-election. The mastermind behind that mobile campaign? Steve Jobs. And the iPhone and iPad are Obama’s secret weapons.

According to a profile in Business Week of Jim Messina, Obama’s former White House deputy chief of staff and now his campaign manager, Obama’s mobile campaign is heavily influenced by two conversations had with Steve Jobs before his death last year.

According to Messina, Jobs talked a lot about how the world had changed since Obama’s re-election. Back in 2008, the iPhone had just started to revolutionize the way we think of mobile, but hadn’t really gained much momentum yet.

Now, everyone has iPhones and iPads, and according to Jobs, the key to re-election was to make use of them.

“Last time you were programming only a couple of channels (the Web and e-mail),” Jobs reportedly said. “This time, you have to program content to a much wider variety of channels — Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, Google — because people are segmented in a very different way than they were four years ago.”

In other words, Jobs told Messina that Obama should be using smartphones and tablets as his tools for going viral. It’s an astute point, and whether you like Obama or not, it looks as if part of the credit for an Obama victory can be given posthumously to Jobs.

Source: Business Week

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