Dan Siroker, Director of Analytics for Obama's First Presidential Campaign to speak at Business of Software Conference

Dan Siroker heard Senator Obama speak when he visited Google Campus at the behest of Eric Schmidt back in the days when he wasn’t the POTUS. He was so impressed with what he heard that he volunteered to be part of the Campaign team, eventually resigning his position at Google to work on this full time. As Director of Analytics for the campaign, he , in his own words,

“Led a team of software engineers and analysts to maximize voter registration, email sign-ups, and donations. Helped the campaign raise more than half a billion dollars from small donations from millions of voters.”

You can get a flavour of some of the things that Dan and his team did from this talk from 2010:

We are delighted Dan will be talking at Business of Software Conference about the lessons that he has learned during this time, as a product manager at Google, an entrepreneur and most recently, as CEO Founder of Optimizely (tagline, A/B testing you’ll actually use), where his company has helped over 4,000 companies, from Walt Disney, Starbucks and Salesforce through to startups including LogMeIn, Yammer, Asana and 37 Signals. He will share some of the secrets data and social media secrets of the Obama campaign (many of the techniques were widely adopted by both main parties for the 2012 campaigns proving that technical advantage is temporary at best), as well as offer some practical help and advice about making A/B testing a habit in any emerging software business.

About Dan Siroker

Dan is the CEO and Founder of Optimizely, the company he founded after his time as Director of Analytics for the Obama Presidential Campaign and Deputy New Media Director for the Presidential Transition. While there, his team relied on the use of A/B and multivariate testing to maximize e-mail sign-ups, awareness, volunteers, and donations to raise additional revenue for the campaign. Before Optimizely, Dan co-founded an online math game for kids called CarrotSticks. Formerly, he was also a Product Manager for Google Chrome and AdWords. Dan graduated with Honors from Stanford University with a B.S. in Computer Science.

Talk

If data can help win Elections, what can it help you do for your business?

Dan will talk about his experiences as Director of Analytics for the Obama Election campaign. In Obama’s campaign against Senator McCain, The Republican Party raised $201 million from online and offline donations (not including Federal contributions). The Democrats meanwhile raised $156 million offline. This was however dwarfed by the little over $500 million raised in online fund raising. Whatever your political views, there is no doubt a key part of Obama’s successful campaign was the social media activity that surrounded it. Dan will consider what he has learned running this campaign.

Don’t just think of this talk as a blue print to win an election – in the 2012 campaigns both main parties used similar ideas extensively to optimize the output of their campaigns but  Dan will offer some insight into how social media and data can make your business better and how you can apply some of the principles to your business today.

We want our attendees to be inspired to: start A/B testing – today. Companies like Disney, Amazon and Salesforce already use optimization as a core part of their business activity and they have masses of data that they can use to achieve this but how can smaller organizations with relatively small data sets use it to generate long term value? How can you get buy-in for A/B Testing in a business? Understand the future of optimization in the software industry as it enables the transition from a one to many relationship to a more personalized relationship with individual customers.