I know lots of people are on the Brand Obama bandwaggon, but I haven’t seen much discussion of the implications of Obama’s brand for governing. There is already a book out by Barry Liebert and Rick Faulk called Barack Inc. that promises to share with you the winning business lessons from the Obama campaign. The idea that a political campaign could have any insights for the private sector is pretty paradigm shaking. It’s hard for me to fathom a book detailing the marketing secrets for business from the Kerry campaign or even the Bush campaign.

As any popular book would do, they’ve broken the more complex reality of Obama’s branding success into a pithy sondbyte:

Be Cool, Be Social, Be the Change

I’m not sure what to make of the the “Be cool” or “Be the Change” stuff yet….it doesn’t seem too earthshaking, but I haven’t read the book. But what I am interested in seeing and thinking about for the next few years is how/whether the “be social” parts can translate into political capital. The “be social” part deals with the penetration of the campaign into multiple corners of the on-line social networking world.

What will it take to translate these micro-communities the Obama campaign built on various platforms into leverage that can be used to pressure congress into effecting policy change? Will the Obama campaign get out in front of developments in the Semantic web to create even more narrowly tailored communities? In the public policy literature we talk about epistemic communities of experts and interest groups that produce the ideas that shape policy debates. Will the Obama campaign try to create “super-epistemic” communitiies that can shape policy agendas? can they create targeted “flash” epistiemic communities to deal with pressing crises? We’ll know soon.