You broke protocol by pre-releasing the State of the Union speech here on Medium. Was that debated within the White House?

It was mildly controversial within the White House. Whenever you take a tradition that’s been around for decades and say you want to undo it at the last minute, people can get a little uncomfortable with it. But when we explained the rationale, people were on board. I had come to believe personally that this whole idea of the embargoed State of the Union is kind of a farce. In my experience the White House puts out the State of the Union embargoed 20, 30 minutes before the speech. Then the reporters email it to all their sources in Washington, their sources then email it to their friends, and by the end of the speech, everyone in Washington has had a chance to see the speech but the public hasn’t. So we felt, if everyone in Washington can see it, why can’t the public see it? Putting the speech online in a place where people go to read longer-form content made a lot of sense. We felt people received it well and I think that [other people] will do that. A few days after that, Mitt Romney announced he wasn’t running for President, and he posted it on Medium.

Well, everyone should publish to Medium all the time in my view.

Definitely. I mean, that is the gist of this whole conversation. [Indeed, on Pfeiffer’s last day on the job, he posted his farewell on Medium.]

I hear that you’ve visited Silicon Valley leaders to develop recommendations for how to communicate to audiences. Who did you talk to and what did you learn from them?

I don’t want to get too specific because I asked all those people to keep those conversations quiet. But we talked to people involved at all the big platforms and a lot of people who do digital engagement and marketing both in New York and in Silicon Valley as well as people in the VC world, to help us think about what technology is coming next. One of the goals of the project is to insure that we don’t have the perfect, the best strategy in place for March 2016, and then wake up six months from now and realize that three new things have come [into the picture]. That environment is so dynamic.

People stressed to us a couple of things. When I explained our communication challenges, a lot of folks said, “Yeah, its really hard.” It is not unique to us. Everyone is struggling to figure this out. At least, no one I met with has the magic answer.

The second thing was the idea of upping our game when it comes to working with digital influencers. And then the third one is the need for authenticity. Not just from the President but from all the administration officials who have an online presence or an online following. Your Twitter and Facebook needs to be [more than] Obama-bot talking points. It has to be an engagement strategy of actually, like, going back and forth with people, responding to people who disagree with you, or thanking people who say nice things or favorite their tweets. That’s not a natural thing for folks in government because it’s not really what people are trained to do. There’s risk involved and your goal as someone who works in the White House or anywhere in government is to keep yourself off the front page of the newspaper and not get unwanted attention.

How do you picture White House communications in the future—what’s your vision of the environment in 2020?

A bigger part of the job for White House government officials will be online engagement. If you’re doing climate change policy in the White House, instead of getting X number of hours a week to meet with the environmental groups, you will be spending time on Twitter, Facebook or whatever the next social platforms are, engaging people who are interested in that topic. You will not be reaching the quantity of people that you would reach by having a big broadcast television interview but the quality of the outreach will be better because you’ll be getting very engaged people who can take action on behalf of the thing you care about.

And I think that—and this one is tricky—a White House will have to have many more resources dedicated to producing content. We have a lot of people around here who write written words—speeches, talking points, press releases—and you will need people who are creating visual, graphical and video images to communicate the same message. It’s tricky because you don’t want to be in a world where it is propaganda. You’re going to have to vet this and give it scrutiny, but there is an insatiable appetite for content out there. Your traditional news outlets don’t have the resources to produce the amount of content that the Internet requires on a 24/7 basis.

There’s this funny thing where it’s like, if we put out a press release, it is accepted as a proper form of Presidential communication. But if we put out a video, that’s somehow propaganda. The mentality is going have to shift [to acknowledge that] a video is just a more shareable, more enjoyable way of communicating the same information as the press release. Everyone is going to have to adjust to that.

Can you give an example where one of your nontraditional efforts flopped?

There are things that have not performed as well as I would have thought. We did a video a couple of weeks ago to announce the ACA enrollment numbers on Facebook; we’re trying to break more news directly on digital platforms. And we did a video. It did fine, a couple million views, but that was not as good as some other recent content. I think the thing I missed was that the question of whether we had reached a certain number in ACA enrollment was a big discussion among reporters here, but no one who is on Facebook was really super curious about that.

Maybe you needed a better headline.

(Laughs) Yes. Ten reasons why you won’t believe what we saw in this video! But the important lesson there was that while the press was very interested in whether we got to 10 or 11 million sign-ups, to the public it really doesn’t matter.

One last question relating to your departure from the White House. Now that Jay Carney filled the Amazon communications job, what Silicon Valley company are you going to be working for?

My first task is to go on a long vacation.

They all say that.

It’s true. I don’t know what I want to do next. I spent my entire career either working in the White House or trying to get to work in the White House and so this is a real leap into an unknown for me. I am curious to see if there is a way to continue exploring how we can successfully disseminate information in this media environment, whether it’s at one company or a series of projects or something. Whether that’s an actual thing I’ll be involved in or whether I’ll just watch from the sidelines is an open question.

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