Obama has been talked about en masse online post his election win and I am afraid I am going to continue with another post. The level of access to his presidential campaign and the use of new internet technologies as an enabler to do this has brought a completely different aspect to the presidential race. Whilst it is obvious that all the material released was still controlled, the sheer amount of information and interaction led to a greater understanding of the campaign. There is no doubt that Obama’s internet campaign was a success and I think it will be used in marketing courses the world over for a long time. The first of which is a half day event dedicated to everything he did online coming up in London soon. Of course there is plenty on the web already!
That is all great, but will it continue? It would be interesting to see if after the election Obama could continue the “open” discussion. Change.gov looks like it is might continue post election.. we will see. In the meantime another post election release, you can now see Obama’s election night photos on Flickr.
Here are some info on Obama’s camapaign online (I’ll add to these as I find them):
- ~1800 Youtube videos with more than 18m views (see channel here )
- The Obama-Biden Facebook page has over 2m supporters (here)
- ~53,000 photos on Flickr (here)
- Great article on Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook who worked on the new media campaign (here)
On an aside, Yahoo did pretty well during the elections. Obama used Flickr and Yahoo News was the most popular site on election day. I was using their election dashboard both on the day and in the run up. It was nicely done.
