Colombian President-elect Juan Manuel Santos, who takes office on August 7, likely owes his victory in last month’s election to 38-year-old American Ravi Singh and his company, ElectionMall.com.
“I wouldn’t say that,” the ever-modest Singh told me.
But facts are facts.
On May 3, polls showed Santos, a conservative former Defense Minister under President Alvaro Uribe, trailing his opponent, former Bogota mayor Antanas Mockus, by a nearly double-digit margin. Furthermore, Santos was getting his butt kicked on the web. Mockus, who according to Singh, had the 20th largest Facebook profile in the world earlier this summer, was dominating his opponent on the popular social networking site, and had more Twitter followers, as well.
Enter Singh.
The ElectionMall CEO, who met Santos in 2008, was hired to jump-start the campaign’s online presence, and did just that. In a mere 50 days, Santos went from 98,000 Facebook fans to 287,000, and from 2,200 Twitter followers to almost 11,000. On June 20, less than two months after Singh’s arrival, Santos destroyed Mockus in the second round of voting, racking up 69% of the popular vote.
Singh credits Santos for self-sparking his turnaround by “realizing that he could no longer ignore the internet.”
Once on the scene, Singh and his Internet Task Force, dubbed the “Web 2.0 Victory Team,” provided the infrastructure and technology to help Santos reach voters online. With internet penetration at over 40% in Colombia, the team created a “virtual headquarters,” a composite of over 1,000 individual websites where voters could browse in an organized fashion through town-by-town news and information relative to the campaign. With cell phone use high among registered voters throughout the country, Singh created tools to allow the campaign to communicate directly with voters via text message. And, in an ode to Fight The Smears, the Obama campaign site dedicated to protecting then-candidate Obama from falsehoods, Singh’s team created a “wall of shame,” to counter and expose myths and misinformation perpetrated by Santos’ opponents.
Singh even somewhat reinvented the game, creating a Super Mario Brothers-like video game, “SuperSantos,” in which users could help Santos fight drug-traffickers, poverty, unemployment - you name it - all in cyberspace.
“I literally had to throw out every trick in the book, and even invent some tricks I wasn’t sure would work,” Singh said.
Of course, before he did anything, Singh told Santos that he would have to agree to two conditions: Santos would have to learn Facebook and Twitter, and would have to carry his Blackberry with him at all times.
“Engagement is crucial,” explained Singh, responding to my question about forcing work upon the man who had hired him. “If you don’t know the vocabulary or how to use the tools, you can’t engage.”