President Barack Obama is known for running one of the most tech-savvy political campaigns in the history of US politics. The chief scientist of the Obama campaign’s data analytics team, Rayid Ghani, shared some insights on how that campaign worked at the TiEcon 2013 conference Friday, an event aimed at entrepreneurs.

Ghani said he and his team applied advanced data-mining and machine-learning techniques to create new tools for voter turnout, fund raising, advertising, social media outreach, and email campaigns.

You’d think the team would have worked with huge amounts of data to come up with simulation models that would shape the outcome of an election, but Ghani said “it was the smallest dataset,” he’d ever used in a real problem.

The key data points were voter registration data – information that is publicly available – and data around people who supported Obama by either volunteering or making contributions to the campaign.

With a year and a half to put the data to work, Ghani didn’t have the luxury to recruit and train a team of engineers on a new technology, or for that matter “install, figure and implement a new technology.”

“We were heavily focused on open source, did a lot of coding ourselves, used a lot of databases, used Hadoop, R, Strata and worked with 20 different vendors,” said Ghani.

The campaign also used Facebook’s social graph search function in a big way, Ghani said.

Based on experiments, the team came up with predictive models that became the basis of a $300 million TV ad-spend and five billion emails sent out by the Obama Campaign.

A machine learning graduate from Carnegie Melon, Ghani worked with Accenture for 10 years before joining the Obama for America campaign.

After helping to get the president re-elected, Ghani now works as chief data scientist at University of Chicago. He’ll be running a three-month summer program on “Data Science for Social Good” at the university for which he’s currently accepting applications from students across the country. Ghani is also working on a social good analytics startup called EdgeFlip.

Photo Credit: Chitra Rakesh/VentureBeat

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

NEW YORK CITY — Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff might not be the best spokesperson for friendly customer service. He’s known for his brash, off-the-cuff comments and leading an aggressive campaign to bring cloud to the enterprise.

But at an event today in New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, Benioff talked quite a bit about communicating with customers and helping companies bridge connections with people through every channel imaginable. Salesforce is now prioritizing “how to be a customer company.”

“When we are connecting to each other, its about the how — how we are connecting,” Benioff said. “The customer revolution is also a trust revolution. And that changes everything.”

Benioff used the stage today to spotlight new additions to Salesforce’s Service Cloud. The big focus of the announcement is that companies can use Service Cloud to connect with customers on mobile devices in four new ways — direct chat in mobile apps, Communities (forums) inside mobile apps, Service Cloud Touch optimized for mobile devices, and co-browsing.

He said there were many questions that needed to be asked by companies looking to connect with customers and partners.

“How do you listen to every customer?” Benioff said. “How do I engage them on every channel? How do I service customers through the retail store? How do I create communities? How do you connect every partner? How do you connect every product? How do you deliver apps everywhere?”

Benioff cited the “Obama for America” presidential campaign as one of the best examples of how Salesforce had helped an organization connect with people.

That team used Salesforce’s Service Cloud, Chatter, and Platform to help stay connected with employees, registered voters, and leads (in this case, potential voters).

“The election in 2008, I think, was a lot about social media and social networks” Benioff said. “In 2012, it was different. … I downloaded the Obama app and it tells me, ‘These are five people you need to call that aren’t registered to vote.’”

Benioff trotted out Michael Salby, the chief innovation officer for Obama for America, and Vivek Kundra, who was the first CIO for the United States and now a Salesforce executive, as examples of people who had taken advantage of communities and understood how to build customer relationships.

On top of pushing a new “trust revolution” through service channels, Benioff said that social media and networking were clearly another part of delivering on that promise. Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud includes acquisitions of Buddy Media and Radian6, and it uses those tools to help clients better communicate with and track people.

Unilever CIO Willem Eelman talked briefly about how it has used Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud tools to build better relationships.

“Clearly, it’s showing how technology can solve problems for them,” Eelman said. “You have to engage and build trust.”

Benioff also used his stage time to espouse the benefits of location awareness (GPS connectivity to apps) and touch optimization (touchscreens and apps for those screens) as ways to build trust.

“I used to talk about the mobile revolution — now it’s the touch revolution,” “I was at CES and it’s pervasive. … The concept of touch is transforming everything. Touch computers, touch laptops, touch everything.”