Obama’s Election Campaign

Competing in the Non-Traditional Market and its Role

It was a crucial decision for Obama’s team to compete in non-traditional markets using social media and other tools of modern technology. It played an important role in his victory. Barack Obama won the presidency in a landslide victory (by a margin of nearly 200 electoral votes and 8.5 million popular votes) by converting everyday people into engaged and empowered volunteers, donors and advocates through social networks, e-mail advocacy, text messaging and online video. The campaign’s proclivity to online advocacy is a major reason for his victory. Since the election, the social media programs adopted by Obama’s transition team have foreshadowed significant changes in how Obama, as president, will communicate with – and more importantly – through the mass of supporters who were collected, cultivated and channeled during the campaign. Obama wants to be the first president to govern with BlackBerry in hand; he will certainly be the first with a legion of 13 million advocates at his fingertips. Obama’s election campaign has various lessons for academic, political, governmental and social think tanks.

Social media lessons from the Obama campaign

• • Start early
• • Build to scale
• • Innovate where necessary; do everything else incrementally better
• • Make it easy to find, forward and act
• • Pick where you want to play
• • Channel online enthusiasm into specific, targeted activities that further the campaign’s goals
• • Integrate online advocacy into every element of the campaign

Tactical Advantage created by the campaign’s use of Technology

Obama’s effective use of technology created a wide gap in electoral votes. The following points explain how use of technology created tactical advantage over other candidates in the election campaign.

• 13 million people on the e-mail list who received 7,000 variations of more than 1 billion e-mails

• 3 million online donors who contributed 6.5 million times

• 5 million “friends” on more than 15 social networking sites. 3 million friends on Face book alone

• 8.5 million monthly visitors to MyBarackObama.com (at peak)

• 2 million profiles with 400,000 blog posts

• 35,000 volunteer groups that held 200,000 offline events

• 70,000 fundraising hubs that raised $30 million

• Nearly 2,000 official YouTube videos watched more than 80 million times, with 135,000 subscribers

• 442,000 user-generated videos on YouTube

• 3 million people signed up for the text messaging program. Each received 5 to 20 messages per month.

• 3 million personal phone calls placed in the last four days of the campaign

Obama’s Election Campaign for 2012

Barack Obama's official announcement of his re-election bid for the 2012 presidential election is a million miles away from the traditional setting of a brass band on a stage decked with American flags. Using modern media to the fullest, the first news of Obama's announcement came via the Internet, YouTube video, Twitter and in an email to supporters from Obama himself:

“Today, we are filing papers to launch our 2012 campaign. We're doing this now because the politics we believe in does not start with expensive TV ads or extravaganzas, but with you – with people organizing block-by-block, talking to neighbors, co-workers, and friends. And that kind of campaign takes time to build. So even though I'm focused on the job you elected me to do and the race may not reach full speed for a year or more, the work of laying the foundation for our campaign must start today.”

So this announcement clearly indicates that the role of technology and specially the internet and modern media will be prominent in the election. Other parties will also try the same tactics to get some advantage but the difference of how Obama’s team put their agenda before the voters and business community will create a competitive edge.