Barack Obama has over 100,000 followers on twitter. According to Twitterholic, that’s a lot more than anyone else. On Facebook, Obama has 2.2 million “friends” compared to 745,000 for McCain. On MySpace, Obama has 588,000 friends compared to McCain’s 188,000.
Twitter is just part of a highly successful internet strategy which also includes wikis, youtube and email. So good has this strategy been that Buzz News says that Obama is the marketer of the year in 2008:
Barack Obama is the 2008 marketer of the year, all categories combined. With the help of his teams, he has created an unprecedented multi-channel communication strategy. No ifs, ands, or buts about it, Obama is everywhere: more than 1,600 videos published on his YouTube page, his own Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc…and we can’t forget to mention all the content that Obama supporters have unofficially created for their presidential candidate.
It’s about money, of course, you can’t win the presidency without oodles of the stuff:
Thanks largely to the unprecedented use of the internet, Obama’s campaign attracted 632,000 new donors in September. By some estimates Obama’s internet activities have now raised more than 1 billion dollars since he started campaigning two years ago. That’s more than 10 times as much as John Kerry raised over the internet just four years ago.
That delivered an enormous $US150 million in September alone.
But it’s also about volunteers. The Obama campaign may have the best ground campaign ever, certainly much better than McCain’s, and it uses a wiki to help organise it:
The Obama campaign is using software from business intranet provider Central Desktop to manage “precinct captains” — volunteers who get out the vote and spread the campaign message in specific precincts across the state. The campaign started using the software during the run up to an earlier nominating contest in California — the nation’s most populous state. “The Web-based collaboration platform combined with a strong organized grass-roots effort, created unprecedented public involvement that is revitalizing politics in America,” said Patrick DeTemple, the California Data & Systems Manager for the Obama campaign. “Not since Bobby Kennedy has there been such an extensive Precinct Captain operation for a presidential candidate in California.”
Central Desktop is a wiki-based collaboration tool that competes with 37Signals’ Basecamp (to put it in some perspective). Though most users are business clients who utilize the software as a private intranet, the Obama campaign is using it to power a public facing wiki to organize information for precinct captains in Texas. According to Garcia, the campaign is using the software on their own without much input beyond basic support from Central Desktop — or in other words, the campaign has been savvy enough to figure out how to utilize an existing tool for a completely new use case.
In many ways this is all a 21st century of a highly successful 20th century strategy used by many organisations:
Micah Sifry, co-founder of TechPresident.com, a blog about politics and technology. (said) Obama’s campaign organization has done a particularly good job of using new technology to reach voters.
“What is emerging here into fuller view is the most robust multilayered political machine that anybody has built in modern American history,” he said. Politicians have known for years the power of peer networks. Labor unions, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association are classic examples of social networks campaigns used to their advantage long before the Internet age.
But those organizations were 20th century in their design. Campaigns worked with leaders at the top whose commands would trickle down through committee heads and precinct captains to voters at the bottom.
The 21st century networks are less hierarchical, with ideas and energy traveling up, down and sideways among the campaign, activists, bloggers, friends and family members.
Win or lose, Obama’s campaign will be studied intensively by political campaigners, marketers and just about anyone interested in professional communications over the next few years. I predict we will be inundated by shelves of book titles and legions of (hopefully insightful) conference presentations.
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