Steve Jobs taught Obama campaign how to go viral

Obama campaign manager Jim Messina went to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs to learn how to take the president’s reelection campaign viral, according to a new article available Thursday.

“He knew exactly where everything was going,” Messina told Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s Joshua Green of Jobs, who died last year. “He explained viral content and how our stuff could break out, how it had to be interesting and clean.”

The ability to go viral on social media offers any political campaign the chance to get more bang for their buck, because friends typically pass on content to other friends in an exponentially widening social circle without adding to campaign costs.

According to Messina, Jobs urged him to expand the campaign to Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube and Google “because people are segmented in a very different way than they were four years ago.”

The Obama campaign has a presence on each of those services, as well as on a few more, such as Pinterest and Spotify.

Messina, in gearing up to run the reelection campaign, deliberately sought out advice from other innovators, notably DreamWorks’s Steven Spielberg and Google’s Eric Schmidt, and also discussed the lucrative growth of campaign merchandise with Vogue’s Anna Wintour, according to the article.

Much of their advice can be seen in the campaign’s aggressive social media outreach and thematic Web videos such as the "Romney Economics" series. A variety of interactive videos, which prompt users to click for more information on a campaign-run site, are also currently playing to micro-targeted users in heavy rotation on sites such as Hulu.

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