FaceBook It: Obama’s Winning
ADOTAS – If the presidential election could be won with Facebook friends, Obama would win by a landslide. Currently, Barack Obama has more than 1.1 million friends while John McCain weighs in with a paltry 162,000 pals.
But Obama’s Facebook victory can’t be merely attributed to social networkers political leanings. It helps that he hired Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, 24, in early 2007 to help run his new-media campaign — probably permanently changing the way political races will be run in the future. My.BarackObama.com (MyBo) is the centerpiece of Hughes’ (and Obama’s) online push.
A report in The New York Times traces Hughes’ impressive footprint within Obama’s campaign and explains how it raised “more than two million donations of less than $200 each and swiftly mobilize hundreds of thousands of supporters before various primaries.”
“One of my fundamental beliefs from my days as a community organizer is that real change comes from the bottom up,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “And there’s no more powerful tool for grass-roots organizing than the Internet.”
The Obama campaign credits taking the Texas caucus (despite a popular vote loss) to the power of the Internet. (His team used database technology to track 100,000 Texas volunteers and carry off a lead of five delegates, the Times reports).
Now that Obama is the presumptive Democratic nominess, Hughes and Co. have turned toward the general election by expanding online phone-calling technology, snapping up online ads (spending $3 million between January and April alone), texting voters, emailing supporters and producing online videos.
MyBo remains the connecting link, however. By setting up an Obama-centric network that allows supporters to reach out to each other and create relationships, the campaign is tapping into America’s grass-roots mentality in way that hasn’t been (perhaps couldn’t be) done by a politician since the 1960’s. MyBo currently has 900,000 members.
McCain’s social networking strategy has been widely mocked, perhaps unfairly. McCainSpace, part of JohnMcCain.com, is “virtually impossible to use and appears largely abandoned,” Adam Ostrow, the editor of Mashable, told the Times. Even if McCain hired industry heavyweights to run his online campaign, he is unabashedly not tech savvy — so any serious online push from McCain’s corner would come off as disingenuous at best.
So what was Obama’s online inspiration? Howard Dean’s 2004 Internet-heavy campaign. We all know how that turned out.
Reader Comments.
In this 21st century, the United States might have a black president that got voted through making his presence known because of the internet? It is 2008!
Michele
www.bocanetworks.com
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