obama ‘un’packaged 3 of 6: new media at its most resourceful

Clockwise from top left - Obama on Facebook, www.barackobama.com, Twitter and MySpace.

 

According to statbrain.com, the official website of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign - www.barackobama.com – gets 2,553,683 visits per day. Please note PER DAY. And the total number of links to the site is 2,682,473.

 

Obama’s facebook profile has 3,607,683 supporters, his MySpace profile has 1,083,117 friends and his twitter profile has 158,268 followers (it’s relatively new). My head’s already spinning. And these figures are just the tip of his monumental online campaign.

 

When Obama was putting together his cause with David Axelrod, his strategist, and David Plouffe, his campaign manager, grassroots participation was concluded to be the soul of the campaign. And in today’s digital era what better way was there to reach the voters than to meet them where they hung out, namely, online through websites and social networking sites or ‘socnets’ as they are called, and using e-mails and text messaging.

 

And so Triple O, Obama’s online operation was created with a handful of whiz kids. Meet 27 year old Joe Rospars, the new media director, Chris Hughes (24), co-founder of facebook and the architect to be of My.BarackObama.com or MyBO, and Kate Albright-Hanna (32), award winning CNN producer and the brain behind his heart-warming videos.

 

Technology and the Internet were put at the heart of the election campaign. It was used to raise funding, communicate Obama’s messages, and most importantly, enlist, encourage and garner supporters.

 

A staggering US$500 million was raised through online funding alone during the 21-month campaign, heralding a new digital era in presidential funding. The average online donation was US$80, and the average donor gave more than once.

 

In addition to his own website, Obama went one step further and created his own social networking site, My.BarackObama.com, for supporters networking. It has 2 million members and 35,000 volunteer groups.

 

Obama has a further 5 million supporters in other socnets, with his profiles appearing in more than 15 online communities. These range across all strata of society, from LinkedIn to Eons – an online community for boomers.

 

New media is ofcourse not just websites and socnets. It is e-mail and text messaging as well which Obama revolutionised the use of. He has 13 million addresses on his database. 7,000 different messages totalling 1 billion e-mails have been sent out during the campaign. Over a million people are signed up on Obama’s text messaging programme.

 

And this is my favourite part. Who needs CNN or Fox News or NBC when you can have your own channel? Obama’s YouTube Channel has 1,827 videos and has had 20,318,853 views! He also has his own video portal BarackTV on BarackObama.com. Though most of the videos are about the candidate, many feature the supporters. “Early on, we wanted to capture the sense that this campaign is not just about Obama,” says Albright-Hannah, head of the channel.

 

And that’s what struck the gold. This campaign is about the supporters. It is about their initiatives and their participation. And Obama spoke to them in their language and reached their home turfs to talk to them. He took politics and made it digital in an online world.

 

Endnote: All statistics for the websites and socnets are as of 31 December 2008. The campaign employed only 95 people in its online operations.

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