Campaigns 2.0

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Much has been said about the Obama campaign: from breaking fundraising tenets to building a wide net of organizational muscle, even having an every-county presence in battleground states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania.

His campaign even made a Super Bowl Ad in over 20 states costing over US$2.5 million, and going as far as local placements when Fox refused to air it. His campaign revolutionized political advertising by adopting more and longer spots (60- and 120-seconds), even the 30-minute infomercial on primetime which ran simultaneously in broadcast and cable networks, as well as the use of technologies. That created what is today known as the “inline brand” or the seamless convergence of online and offline communications.

Obama’s magnificent run can aptly be titled as “The Marketing of a President”.  But let’s set that aside for a while and focus on what is shaping to be a marked influence by Web 2.0 on politics and campaigns.

Web 2.0 refers to how we think of and use the worldwide web and the Internet as a platform of activities such as communications, information generation and dissemination, education, social networking, social media and marketing, among others. Web 2.0 harnesses community and collective intelligence and enables a “richer user-experience.” It encourages the user to innovate. It is powerfully egalitarian because diversity and uniqueness are appreciated and valued.  It becomes even more powerful when online activity translates into real world action in creative ways.

Team Obama’s masterful use of Web 2.0 created a significant online presence as well as online community for the presidential candidate, thereby making the brand Obama "sticky" online. As Phil Noble said, “The Obama campaign is a perfect storm with a seamless diamond” made up of the candidate, a strong message, money and media.

Google “Obama” and one will get 79 million page results. Google McCain and one will only get 18.9 million page results, four times less than the now President-elect. Obama’s slogan “Change We Can Believe In”, netted 97.4 million page results.

Obama has a significant online community. In the rapidly expanding social networking site Facebook, Obama has nearly four times more supporters at 2.24 million compared to McCain’s 595,167 supporters. In the older MySpace, Obama again has four times more friends at 771,493 compared to McCain’s 195,017. Obama’s page is more active with 463,890 wall posts and 1,664 notes compared to 118,199 wall posts and 125 notes for McCain. McCain though has a discussion section containing 6,108 discussion topics, while Obama discussion group is in Facebook and in a website called Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack) with 835,271 members, 54,783 discussion topics, and even 4,221 pictures posted.

Obama is said to be sticky online. By sticky, it means that the content online either gets one to return to the website or it gets one’s attention. Obama is not only sticky but his online reputation is positive. On the widely successful video sharing website YouTube, Obama video results numbered 571,000 to McCain’s 176,000. Obama has a whopping 85,082,123 YouTube views compared to McCain’s 22,598,936. In addition, Obama racked up a humongous 14,548,809.05-viewing hour compared to McCain’s 488,093.01 hours. Obama’s website has a 61.19% market share vis-à-vis McCain’s 32.18%.

There were two key take-away message in the successful “inline brand”: the use of field technology to cover the 50-state strategy of the DNC where 180 million voter profiles were made, enabling microtargeting to be used; and the use of the Internet for money + message + mobilization strategies.  We will discuss these in our next column.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions advanced in this article is the author’s own, and may not necessarily represent the views and opinions of THE LOBBYiST, its editors, or its publishers.

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