Veteran campaign strategist Joe Trippi, who ran the Howard Dean campaign for President in 2004, says, ‘the tools [for elections] changed between 2004 and 2008. Barack Obama won every single caucus state that matters, and he did it because of those tools, because he was able to move thousands of people to organize.’

With a charismatic leader out front, the Obama campaign especially was able to connect with young people, roughly 18 to 29 years old, the cohort known as the millennials, who will outnumber the baby boomers by 2010. Young people were attracted to him by his early opposition to the war in Iraq, as well as his personal ‘audacity of hope’ story, allowing him to mobilise their energy and passion. Says Chris Hughes, the Obama campaign’s director of online organising, ‘the community that elected Obama raised more money, held more events, made more phone calls, shared more videos, and offered more policy suggestions than any in history. It also delivered more votes.’

The Obama campaign centrally involved the internet from the very beginning. BarackObama.com featured constant updates, videos, photos, ringtones, widgets, and events to give supporters a reason to come back to the site. More than any previous campaign, they took advantage of the still-developing interactive Web 2.0 tools and their social networking capabilities, deploying them as a vehicle for generating excitement among a vast online community.When he officially declared his candidacy in February 2007, his campaign launched MyBarackObama.com, a social networking site in which 2 million profiles and 35,000 volunteer groups eventually were created, and 200,000 off-line events planned. Later that spring, the campaign took over a grassroots Obama fan page on MySpace with 160,000 followers. It created Obama profiles on a dozen social networks, from BlackPlanet to AsianAve. On Facebook, Obama fan groups eventually grew to 3.2 million supporters. Those are staggering numbers, an extraordinary level of engagement, especially among the youth.

On MyBarackObama.com, Obamaniacs could create their own blogs around platform issues, send policy recommendations directly to the campaign, set up their own mini fundraising site, organise an event, even use a phonebank widget to get call lists and scripts to tele-canvass from home. All the campaigns also used something called ‘online behavioural targeting’, but Obama’s team was more effective. When a prospective voter navigated to one of the candidate’s sites, a ‘cookie’ or internet tag, was placed in that user’s web browser. That cookie could identify the types of sites the user visited afterward, helping inform which political ads were served up to the user. Before, candidates had to rely on stereotyping large swaths of voters and making TV spots to suit. But in the 2008 election they were able to literally formulate an ad campaign for each individual voter. Obama’s campaign was smart about segmenting its supporters, crafting different methods of communication for each group. With younger voters, for instance, they made use of text messaging; for older voters, they sent short, concise emails. With an email or a text every few days, people were kept abreast of the latest news and talking points without the costly expenses of TV ads or direct mailings.

Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, a website that explores how technology is changing politics says, ‘if you think about the fact that they have cell phone numbers, emails, blog comments, donations and MyBarackObama profiles and so forth, they have multiple levels of data about their supporters. Let us say they then take that data and mash it with voter files, for example. They find someone who visits BarackObama.com every day, has given them $10 a month for the last few months, has offered their mobile phone number, has voted in Democratic primaries for the last 12 years. That is probably someone who would be willing to volunteer for them.’ And out goes an email and text message to each individual about volunteering, with specific locations near their home or work. With online campaigning, Raseij says, ‘you can see where you get traction, and then reinvest, based on data.’

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6