Big Brother sees all.
(Bloomberg) — Will St. Clair, wearing semi-rimless glasses, a plaid buttoned-down shirt, jeans and Adidas sneakers, can usually be found sitting on an exercise ball in the back of President Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters, his eyes trained on his computer screen.
The 23-year-old’s job is a mystery even to some senior staff in Chicago, yet they say they hope the skills he brings are a secret weapon: he’s a software engineer.
St. Clair is among more than a dozen developers hired by the campaign to leverage technology to wring out more votes in what Obama’s advisers say may be an election as close as the contested 2000 race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. From Seattle startups to International Business Machines Corp., they’ve left lucrative jobs to mine for swing voters. They’ve added a new term to the strategic lexicon: microlistening. […]
St. Clair and his team are creating tools to connect with people properly. For example, disenchanted voters are wooed, not hit up for money. They call it microlistening.
Other hints can be gleaned from an Obama campaign job posting that Gage, now consulting for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, took note of last spring recruiting “quantitative analysts.”
“The Obama for America analytics department analyzes the campaign’s data to guide election strategy and develop quantitative, actionable insights that drive our decision-making,” it says. “We are a multi-disciplinary team of statisticians, mathematicians, software developers, general analysts and organizers — all striving for a single goal: re-electing President Obama.”
The Obama team is taking technology development in-house.
“In 2008 we were very adept users of technology,” said Michael Slaby, the campaign’s chief integration and innovation officer. “We are much more ambitious about what we’re capable of building on our own.”