If you’ve followed the US election campaigns (and it's been hard not to) over the last few months, one thing that was truly amazing about Barack Obama’s campaign was his use of the internet and digital media.
Of course, we are all used to online political campaigning even in the UK (how could we forget David Cameron’s infamous Blog?) but Obama’s campaign has been significant in how he has used the very best practices from the world of online e-commerce applied it to raising funds for his campaign.
He has used every online device to encourage voters to donate: from mobile ring tones, to his own blog, email updates from the campaign manager &, of course, social networking. In fact Obama was dubbed the “Master of Facebook Politics” by the New York Times with about 1.5 million online ‘friends’ (compare this to ‘only’ 142,000 friends for John McCain).
All this has managed to translate the huge public enthusiasm for him directly into cash. To put this into context, in February of this year his campaign raised a record-setting $55 million— with $45 million donated over the Internet—without Obama hosting a single fund-raiser himself. The money just came rolling in and has allowed Obama to campaign harder and deeper than McCain - just look at Obama's 30min election advert over the weekend.
Why is this important? Because it’s a great demonstration of how online engagement & interaction can be used to drive consumer action. Now that Obama has seen that he can drive cash donations, the next challenge is to turn that into votes. It’ll certainly be interesting to watch.
http://www.barackobama.com/index.php
http://www.new.facebook.com/barackobama?ref=s&refurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.new.facebook.com%2Fs.php%3Fq%3Dbarack%2Bobama%26init%3Dq
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