I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty much all campaigned out. The presidential campaign ended over three weeks ago now, but people are still talking about it. It was an extremely long cycle and it seems some people just can’t get enough. I’m tired of talking about, but it’s still important to think about some of the significant achievements.
The Obama campaign took the 2004 Howard Dean campaign’s groundbreaking new methods and drastically improved them. The level of organization and participation was nothing ever seen before in a national campaign. Much of the success can be attributed to Obama’s website and the ways his Internet team promoted and protected him. There were numerous methods which contributed to the campaign’s success.
Obama was the first candidate to use a splash page. When a user logged on to barackobama.com, the splash page appeared first. It caught their attention and got into details right away, asking them to register and donate money. In addition to the splash page, users could donate throughout the website. Obama set new standards in fundraising, and the majority of it came from very small donations. Another great thing about the website was the constant stream of new content. Thousands of videos from the campaign trail were uploaded to the site, allowing the public to keep tabs on the candidate. In many ways, the campaign served as its own press corps. The video coverage was great, but the fact that staffers were blogging with updates created a transparency not seen before. One last innovation that Obama got a lot of coverage for was the use of text messaging. He announced his choice of Joe Biden via text message. The method was a nice idea but I just found it hard to believe that nobody had thought of it before.
Of course, not everyone liked Obama, and there was a considerable effort to smear him. The Obama team was unfazed though, and had an answer for the ugly tactics. It established separate sections of the website that were intended to combat the specific smears. If someone googles “Barack Obama” and “Muslim,” one of the first sites that comes up is Fight the Smears, which was set up by Obama’s team to debunk all the lies.
It was not just Obama’s team that tried to sway public opinion. This campaign cycle saw an explosion in voter-generated content. Regular folks, and some celebrities, created their own videos, t-shirts, games, etc., all in an effort to promote Obama’s election. Several items of VGC went viral, reaching a mass audience. All of this was free advertising for Obama and allowed a level of participation by people unaffiliated with the campaign that had never been seen.
Obama’s team took campaigning to a whole new level and no doubt revolutionized the process. It will be very interesting to see what happens in 2012. Will Obama maintain his Web supremacy?
Digital Champagne 