How Obama Used The Internet To Win The Presidency?
His dominance of the Internet is second to none. Obama Web 2.0 Strategy Brought Politics 2.0 to Life
The internet has proved to be one of the key tools to Obama’s success. Obama started his campaign from scratch with few resources and little name recognition. He used the power of the web to reach out to a large web savvy audience.
The internet favours the outsider, and gives them the ability to quickly mobilise supporters and money online. Both of which Obama did in good measure.
Obama's internet strategy was at the heart of his plan to win the Democratic nomination. His internet site was already fully developed and ready to go - with a set of tools which allowed supporters to meet and organise as well as contribute money. The ability of Obama to raise massive amounts of cash without having to spend wasteful time fundraising was key to his 50 state strategy.
His message of ‘Change’ and ‘Yes We Can’ was clearly echoed through his web strategy. In quick time he galvanized the support of over 2 million online registered volunteers.
Through his web site, Obama transformed people from supporters into participants. People were actively thinking about why they supported Obama and how to express that. That gave them a feeling of having a much greater stake in the campaign, which in turn drove the historic turnout rates.
Youth vote had a major role to play in the landslide victory, and the role that the internet - the living space of the youth - had to play will make for an interesting Harvard case study.
Here are some interesting facts that substantiate Obama’s rise on the internet.
- In February 2007, Obama didn’t attend one single fundraiser and still managed to raise US $55 million online.
- Obama raised close to US $1 billion online during the campaign, 12 times more than John Kerry raised through online fundraising in 2004.
- A poll by the Pew Research Center found 33 percent people got most of their 2008 campaign news from the Internet, compared with 10 percent in 2004.
- As a candidate, Obama had four times as many friends as his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, on MySpace.com.
- To date, some 6.7 million people have watched his 37-minute ‘Speech on Race’ on YouTube.
- Obama had almost 3 million supporters on Facebook and put together a massive database of 10 million subscribers through my.barackobama.com.
- Obama’s use of social networking sites helped Obama to mobilize young people, a group which has traditionally been uninterested in politics.
- Obama made US political history by placing the first presidential campaign ads in online video games
- Obama even announced Sen. Joe Biden as his choice for Vice President in a text message to supporters.
- More than 461,000 sites link to www.barackobama.com on the web.
- President-elect Barack Obama has launched www.Change.Gov to chronicle his transition. The web site is an extension of Obama's online strategy during the campaign.
The challenge now is how the President-elect can evolve his Internet savvy campaign into an Internet savvy government.
As many believe, For Kennedy it was the television, For Obama it was the INTERNET. It is fair to say, “Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be President”.
After Obama has made all his thank you calls to people who helped him get elected as the President of US, I just hope he does not forget to make that 3am call to Vinton Serf!
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