The Green Olive Yuk

Joshua November 24th, 2008

When President Elect Barack Obama announced his candidacy on Feb 10, 2007 he already had a full fledged web site with tools making it easy for supporters to meet and organize, as well as contribute to the campaign. This gave him a head start against his competitors. Throughout the election race, Obama’s campaign utilized the internet more and more.

The Obama campaign embraced web 2.0 technology to its fullest. They used YouTube for it’s free advertising and focused on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

YouTube allowed for instant access to speeches and interviews with Obama. I for one used YouTube to catch up on speeches that I had missed.  In particular Barack’s race speech, which has been viewed over 5.5 million times.

By focusing on MySpace and Facebook, Obama was able to reach young people, even those not old enough to vote. He was able to engage the people and make them interested in politics, which is no easy feat. The Obama campaign even hired Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes to build its own social networking site, myBarackObama.com.

These social networking sites were used to organize people and get them in touch with Obama supporters in their area. Making it easier to organize local rally’s and Obama events as well as contribute to the campaign.

Volunteers used Obama’s website to organize a thousand phone-banking events in the last week of the race — and 150,000 other campaign-related events over the course of the campaign. Supporters created more than 35,000 groups clumped by affinities like geographical proximity and shared pop-cultural interests. By the end of the campaign, myBarackObama.com chalked up some 1.5 million accounts. And Obama raised a record-breaking $600 million in contributions from more than three million people, many of whom donated through the web. - Wired Blog

It will be great to see what the internet brings us four years from now. I personally think web enabled cell phones will have a big effect.

This election, the Obama campaign created a free iPhone application that helped supporters connect with others and get involved, and stay up to date on breaking issues. The app also organized your contacts by battleground states putting a priority on the friends you should call and urge to vote. Applications like these are the future of the internet.

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