With a little help from Social Media - Yes We Can

Today is the day that the world will see the first black American president take office. I have been following the comments from Barack Obama on Twitter for the last couple of hours and every second I am updated with several new mentions of the President Elect and the impending inauguration ceremony. The world is talking. The online profile and following of this man has been huge throughout his campaign, so I thought that, this close to the official inauguration ceremony, it would be particularly apt to talk about how he got there. 

President Elect Barack Obama has been said to be the most technologically savvy of all the presidents. He understood the importance of Online Marketing in a modern political campaign. The use of Email Marketing, Social Media and Online Reputation Management in his campaign bolstered him through the democratic primaries against Hillary Clinton to ultimately emerge as the winner after the November elections against John McCain.

The first time I was exposed to the online Obama campaign was through a personal email my Uncle in California had forwarded to me from Obama himself. Obama ran a grass roots email campaignto over 13 million voters across the political spectrum. The example below is an email sent during the run up to the November Presidential elections.

From: Barack Obama

To: mark h******
Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2008 9:53 PM
Subject: What did you think?
Mark --
I think the differences between John McCain and me were pretty clear tonight. I will fight for the middle class every day, and -- once again –- Senator McCain didn't mention the middle class a single time. If you agree that we need to cut taxes for 95% of working families, reduce health care costs, and end the war in Iraq responsibly, then I need your help right now. And if you heard John McCain push more of the same discredited policies, including tax cuts for the wealthy and giant corporations, tax increases on health care, and continuing to spend $10 billion a month in Iraq, then now is the time to act. Four weeks from tonight, we'll know which of us will be the next president. The time to make a difference in this election is running out – will you make a donation of $250 or more right now?
https://donate.barackobama.com/townhall

Thank you
Barack

Over half of the $600 million Obama raised for his campaign was gathered online from a culmination of individual donations of less than $200 each. His success factor was that he recruited supporters online and connected them with real world voters.

Obama adapted to a world were Consumer Generated Media has become so prominent and used it to his advantage. The official Social Media site mybarackobama.com was used by the network of grassroots organisers and volunteers across the campaign states. This served as an application to collaborate and organise their efforts. Unrestricted online community conversations were monitored in order to gauge the public feeling. The campaign was spread over forty social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter and political messages were posted on YouTube.

The A Social Media strategist for the Obama campaign, Rahaf Harfoush, emphasised the importance of using applications such as Twitter to hold two way conversations with the community. Comments were monitored in the blogosphere to see what people were saying and to respond to strong criticism, but mostly to guide the discussion along.

“I think social media is by its definition social. It's about people talking; it's all about conversation, sharing our vision. Seeing what other people have to say about it and talking about it and creating something new.” - Rahaf Harfoush

Traditionally the politician’s reaction to a smear campaign is to remain tight lipped saying only “no comment”. Obama took another view on the matter by adopting an aggressive approach to dealing with Online Reputation Management. He enlisted his army of volunteers to track and monitor online mentions. The fightsmears.com website was developed to debunk all of the email rumours floating around the web about him and his family such as “Obama is a Muslim”.

Image from: http://fightthesmears.com/

South African parties have taken a page out of Obama’s book - the DA and Helen Zille herself have their own Facebook pages and use online reputation software to pick up mentions of the party on the Internet in order to monitor and respond to bloggers. Most politicians are discovering that ORM is a necessary skill and the success of Obama as he enters the Oval Office is proof of this.

*Update: Soon after publishing this post Rahaf contacted us through the comments (see below) to let us know that she isn't "the" Social Media strategist but was rather a full time volunteer within the team. It's been an interesting case of broken telephone where 2nd and 3rd generation online PR has resulted in errors sneaking in. This error has since been rectified. If you interested as to how this happened please read Rahaf's post HERE.