The Obama campaign, as well run as it was, suffered a PR crisis last summer, and the crisis and its aftermath have lessons for organizations of all kinds. Back in early 2007, the campaign had launched my.barackobama.com, a political site modeled on social networks like Facebook and MySpace. The site succeeded in getting legions of enthusiastic supporters signed up to proselytize and donate, without incident—until last June, when the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) came up in the Senate. One provision of FISA offered retroactive immunity to telephone companies that had engaged in surveillance of American citizens. Obama previously had indicated staunch opposition to such a provision, but in the heat of last summer’s campaign, he quietly changed his position. This enraged civil libertarians in the Democratic Party and, before the vote, a group of activists decided to appeal to Obama on his own Web site—and hit on a rather ingenious method for doing so.

Since my.barackobama.com was geared mainly toward allowing groups of supporters to form and join the site, the anti-FISA activists created their own group: “Senator Obama—Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity—Get FISA Right.” The group was created on June 26, and within days it was the fastest-growing group on the site. By early July, Obama was forced to issue a public statement defending his planned FISA vote.

Obama went on to vote for FISA, and the anti-FISA group predictably went berserk. And then a funny thing happened. Some of the activists pointed out that Clinton had voted for FISA too, as had McCain. They pointed out that Obama had responded to them thoughtfully and respectfully, and that he’d told them a hard truth—he agreed with some of what they had to say, but not all of it, and he was going to vote against them anyway. And then people began noticing that Obama had done nothing to censor the conversation on his own site. It was evidence that Obama was both more open and more responsive than the current administration. And many of the activists began to post pro-Obama messages again. The same group that had used Obama’s resources to attack him now began to work on his behalf.

When organizations think about strategy, it’s often in the context of their own objectives. But when the surrounding reality changes—as it is doing in the media landscape—both strategy and goals need to adjust. That is the real lesson of the Obama FISA vote. The disgruntled can now organize, publish, and protest on their own, without using any professional media outlet. Until recently organizations of all stripes were better able to get their messages into the media than any motley groups of individuals. That is no longer true, because two critical organizational advantages—the ability to coordinate group effort and to coordinate group access to the means of publishing—are now ubiquitous, global, and free.

Clients of an organization, whether they are citizens or customers, now have ready access to these tools. Take the case of HSBC. When it added an overdraft fee for recent-graduate bank accounts in the United Kingdom, it hadn’t reckoned that a Facebook group called “Stop the Great HSBC Graduate Rip-off!” would arise. It generated enough negative publicity that the bank reversed course in a matter of weeks. Because Facebook operates outside HSBC’s purview, there was never any question of stopping the protest, so a reaction was needed.

Such reactions suggest another lesson: good judgment doesn’t matter if it’s days too late. For all the supposed decisiveness of managed organizations, by relying on legal and PR departments to respond, most companies now react more slowly than their customers. In the new world we’ve entered, you can only stonewall things on your side of the wall, yet most media is no longer on that side of the wall. The US airline industry, for instance, fought the establishment of a “passenger’s bill of rights” for almost a decade. Then, after disastrous delays at the end of 2006, one angry passenger created a lobbying group with a low budget and no paid staff and forced changes in New York State law in less than eight months. (The matter is now in the courts.)

A radical message from all of this: transparency is the new marketing. People naturally dislike surprises and being mistreated. The anti-FISA protestors were hit with both, feeling their civil rights were at stake and learning that Obama was reversing course. Even under fire, however, Obama held to his implicit bargain with users that political speech would not be censored. Sticking to those principles softened the political damage even after disappointments to some supporters. The campaign also reacted at a speed that most corporations can only envy.

Intel was perhaps the first organization to discover that angry users could find each other to unite. Back in 1995, Intel’s newest chip, the Pentium, turned out to have a subtle bug. The company’s initial reaction was a refusal to replace the chips, reasoning that the problem affected very few users. This backfired. While the number of online users was tiny in those days, they all were computer owners. When Intel downplayed the flaw, users became livid and their blistering public attacks eventually forced an Intel offer to replace every chip. The resulting $40 million financial charge was far more than Intel would have spent with an upfront replacement offer.

We’re all Intels now, it seems. Consider that for just about any organization there’s a group that can affect your business, and if they get angry enough, they will organize against you. But what has also happened over time is that Intel has started to meet users halfway. After a disastrous PR-inflected attempt to “reach out” to techies on Slashdot, an influential tech blog, Intel finally realized that the best way to broker a conversation with the outside world was to let its engineers venture outside, without PR handlers. This necessitated some internal directives about how to participate in public forums, but a real conversation works better than one mediated by PR.

Again, the Obama campaign demonstrated this new relationship between organizations and clients. Its goal was to reach tens of millions of supporters on a tight budget and in a very short time frame. The only way to do that was to recruit supporters as participants. The Obama campaign thus started with the logic that the media landscape has changed—a lesson Intel, HSBC, and US airlines painfully discovered.

Tempting as it may be to think the world will revert to form, user-organized media is not an anomaly. These users do not share the same media environment as global corporations, they have the new advantages of speed and the ability to speak with multiple voices. Indeed, the presence of these real, public conversations is making much of the gloss of business communication seem suspect. The more an organization generates only positive public statements, the more it looks like a cult or a pyramid scheme.

Obama and FISA tell us that efforts to prevent public discontent are no longer enough. Rather, a strategy based on rapid, honest, and direct reaction not only helps an organization recover but can actually increase the loyalty of an increasingly engaged public.

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