With our nation's historic election day just a week behind us, many in the media are discussing a myriad of topics about President-Elect Obama's transition, where his kids are going to school, which type of dog they'll buy, economic policies and how he won the race for the presidency. I'm not an expert political strategist or even a mediocre one, so I'm going to bypass all the political talk and focus on his campaign's technology aspect.


My.BarackObama.com
Some people, like mega blogger Arianna Huffington, say that Obama won the election because of his online presence. Whether you believe that or not, the numbers are staggering. At the end of his campaign, Obama had over 1.5 million members signed up for his volunteer website, My.BarackObama.com, and $600 million raised from the site by 3 million people total. Things like this obviously don't happen by accident; Obama and his buddies didn't just download a free website template and hope people would visit. During the course of his campaign, he hired Joe Rospars as the online director, the same guy who had worked diligently on Howard Dean's web-savvy campaign in 2004. He also picked up Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook, and together Rospars and Hughes built not just a website for Obama supporters and volunteers, but a functioning social network complete with over 35,000 membership groups, individual membership pages, personalized fund-raising pages, etc. With its popularity among volunteers, the site has come to be known as "My Bo."

Obama supporters could sign up for a free membership to the site, and within minutes could have set up their own fund-raising page, uploaded their personal contacts for emailing, printed out lists of voters in their area to go talk to, joined a local group, printed flyers and blogged about it all on their personal page.

Communication through Community
The amount of volunteer interaction and communication that was given to the Obama volunteers through this site was certainly unprecedented. In addition to my.barackobama.com, volunteers gathered phone lists from hard-to-reach younger voters and sent out text messages to them at critical points in the campaign. During the campaign, 150,000 campaign-related events were set up and just one week before the election thousands of phone banking events were used to reach people to the very end. This wasn't just people wearing buttons and t-shirts, these volunteers used all of the communicative resources of the Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc. to connect with like-minded others and recruit others to join them.

Obama's campaign spent money on advertising as well, a significant amount on traditional means like cable, but his Internet advertising was substantial as well. He spent about $8 million on online advertising, which accounts for half of all of the political advertising for all the campaigns.

What's Next
Obama's use of technology and volunteer communication most likely won't end when he becomes president. Already, he has set up a new and official president-elect site (http://www.change.gov/). Even though it has the .gov url, it still reaches out to supporters by giving them the chance to enter text, a picture or video about their stories from the campaign or election day; encouraging Americans to further communicate with him and his team. The site's blog gives updates on what Obama's doing that day, what others are saying in the press and adds conventional press releases as well. We'll only be able to know later on whether he keeps up this dialogue with supporters and with the American people, but at least for now it looks like he's accomplishing it.


Additional Links:

Why You Should Be Part Of Online Networking

Obama Online Strategy

Propelled by Internet, Barack Obama Wins Presidency

my.barackobama.com

http://www.change.gov/