The Facebooker who friended Obama

Before helping build Facebook, the social network of choice for 70 million Americans, the fresh-faced and sandy-haired Mr. Hughes, who grew up in Hickory, N.C., went to boarding school at Andover, where he joined the Democratic Club and the student government. In the fall of 2002, he went to Harvard, where he majored in history and literature. He and a roommate, Mark Zuckerberg — now the chief executive of Facebook — shared a room that was “just about as small as my cubby at work is these days,” Mr. Hughes said.

Mr. Zuckerberg and another Facebook co-founder dropped out in 2004 to work on the site full time, but Mr. Hughes graduated in 2006 before venturing to Silicon Valley.

In February 2007, after showing interest in Mr. Obama’s candidacy and being reassured that the campaign’s new-media operation would be more than “just a couple Internet guys in a corner,” he left Facebook, where he has stock options that are potentially worth tens of millions of dollars, and moved to Chicago, where he lives — and dresses — like any other recent college graduate. “Cabs are a luxury,” he said.

As supporters started to join MyBo in early 2007, Mr. Hughes brought a growth strategy, borrowed from Facebook’s founding principles: keep it real, and keep it local. Mr. Hughes wanted Mr. Obama’s social network to mirror the off-line world the same way that Facebook seeks to, because supporters would foster more meaningful connections by attending neighborhood meetings and calling on people who were part of their daily lives. The Internet served as the connective tissue.

Letting supporters reach one another
While many candidates reach their supporters through the Web, the social networking features of MyBo allow supporters to reach one another.

Mr. Hughes’s abrupt shift from Facebook pioneer to campaign aide was not easy. In the lonely months before the Iowa caucus, he grappled with the small scale of his new social network, measuring its membership by the thousands rather than the millions he was accustomed to. He had to learn mystifying political shorthand (VAN, for voter file management; N.P.G., for the donor and volunteer database) and figure out how campaigns operate. Eventually, he grew comfortable.

At first, his main focus was a single state. Throughout last summer and fall, the prevailing attitude was, “What can you do for Iowa today?” Mr. Hughes recalled.

Mr. Obama’s win in the Iowa caucuses drove new supporters to the MyBo site in droves. Using the campaign’s online toolkit, energized volunteers laid the groundwork for field workers.

So far, MyBo has attracted 900,000 members, although aides play down the raw numbers.

“The point is not to have a million people” signed up, said Joe Rospars, the campaign’s new-media director, although he does expect to have well over a million signed up on MyBo by November. “The point is to be able to chop up that million-person list into manageable chunks and organize them.”

Doug Mills / The New York Times Barack Obama with some campaign essentials: the Secret Service, his staff and his BlackBerry.

In some primary and caucus states, volunteers used the Internet to start organizing themselves months before the campaign staff arrived. In Texas on March 4, Mrs. Clinton won the popular vote, but Mr. Obama came away with a lead of five delegates, thanks to a caucus win. Caucuses are a test of organizational strength, and Mr. Obama’s team used database technology to track 100,000 Texas volunteers and put them to work. This permitted campaign staff members to “skip Steps 1, 2 and 3,” Mr. Hughes said.

So maybe the Obama core does “look like Facebook.” Mr. Penn’s remark, made at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Iowa and reported by The Politico, was cited by both Mr. Rospars and Mr. Hughes in separate interviews.

Virtual phone banks greatly benefited Mr. Obama. During the primaries, volunteers could sign in online, receive a list of phone numbers and make calls from home. The volunteers made hundreds of thousands of calls last winter and spring. At the end of June, the Obama campaign began carefully opening up its files of voters to online supporters, making it easier to find out which Democratic-leaning neighbors to call and which registered-independent doors to knock on.

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