Watching the US presidential coverage on the news always provides entertainment, especially considering how intense the democratic nomination was. While watching one of these segments they mentioned that Barack Obama had raised 100% of his campaign funding through online contributions.

He has not accepted any campaign contributions from large companies or lobbyists. Instead, Barack Obama’s campaign has been one of the most profitable in history, with the majority of campaign contributions made online through over a million small contributions.

In fact, Barack Obama has raised nearly $200 million online, with a record $55 million raised in February alone, or nearly $2 million per day.

That hit my button.

It was a Saturday night and I immediately jumped on my laptop and brought up www.barackobama.com. The next hour was just spent in admiration of the level of detail and expertise implemented by Barack Obama’s online marketing team.

When you know what to look for in a good website and marketing campaign, you can really start to appreciate the level of skill behind his entire online marketing strategy.

Although there are way too many positive elements to cover in this article, here are 6 major strategies which really make the Barack Obama online marketing campaign a raging success:

1. The First Time You Visit Your Site You Are Asked To Join His Mailing List

Before you can view any part of Obama’s site you are taken to a page where you are asked for your name and address:

Notice how he makes it very easy to subscribe, only asking for your email address and zip code. Also notice that the main call to action button ‘learn more’ is in red. This is done to attract the eye to the primary action that he wants you to take on this page. Importantly, you do not have to subscribe to view the rest of his website, you can simply click on ‘skip signup’ to visit the main website – but this is not the focus.

Of course I entered my details in to see what happened, and was taken to this page:

2. Every Web Page Furthers the Primary Action to ‘Donate Now’

No matter what page you are visiting on the Barack Obama website, the red ‘donate now’ button draws your attention. It is essentially the only red image on a blue, grey and white website, which is a very subtle, yet powerful method of encouraging people to take the action.
3. Excellent Information Architecture

The way that the information is laid out and presented makes it easy to use and, more importantly, to scan. Website visitors have the shortest attention span of any mode of communication, quickly jumping between pages and leaving sites where they cannot quickly find what they are looking for.
4. A Blog Is Used To Communicate Messages

Posts are added to the blog multiple times per day to communicate with supporters on a daily basis as well as providing a channel for supporters who only consume news through RSS aggregator software such as
f every blog post.

5. Social Networking Is Used To Maximise Exposure

One of the most impressive elements of Obama’s online marketing campaign is the reach achieved through social networking, which is one of the fastest growing and far reaching methods of online exposure available today.
6. Mobile Marketing Is Used To Further His Message

Barack Obama includes a mobile subscription section on his website where you can join his SMS mailing list.
Summary

If you have ever wondered what a perfect online marketing campaign looks like, just look at the Barack Obama campaign. Their online marketing team are implementing every online marketing strategy available, including social networking, search engine optimisation, pay per click advertising, email marketing, mobile marketing and a number of other strategies. Not only that, but their implementation is flawless.

The cost of running an online marketing campaign like Barack Obama’s would be outside of the budget and resources of most companies, but we can learn a lot about any particular strategy which we are thinking about implementing.

For example, if you are looking at ways to improve your website’s conversion rate, look at how the Obama website is designed. If you are looking at ways to implement social networking, check out the profile pages on MySpace or Facebook.

Start thinking about how you can implement what I have just spoken about in this article on your own website and online marketing campaign.

And most importantly…
TAKE ACTION!
Full Article Here

I believe Obama, unlike McCain or the rest of the republican party, managed to do something that no other Presidential candidate could have done before. He managed to set fire to communities. He brought a message of hope and he manged to let others take that message and mobilize the American people. We see the power of communities on-line in our web 2.0 view of the word. But Obama was able to ignite that power way beyond the boundaries of the web into the physical world. He has changed the way any presidential candidate will ever campaign again. He has shown that if you have a great message and you are able to bring that message to the community, people will get involved. And he isn’t just the president of the current generation, he got the coming generation to get involved and vote.

If anything this election has shown that the effect of traditional media like TV isn’t nearly as powerful as (online) communities. The old fashioned TV campaigns that the Republicans used to discredit Obama failed because it didn’t bring involvement or hope. It merely brought fear and apathy. While the Republicans were doing the thing they are used to doing, Obama mobilised people on the streets, in stadiums, on the web. He talked of hope, of possibilities and he was able to get young and old people involved spreading the word for him. More

Seth Godin is a marketer who is also one of the top ten bloggers in the country. Here’s his take on the power of one-on-one marketing and influencing decision-making:

Stories really matter. More than a billion dollars spent, two ‘products’ that have very different features, and yet, when people look back at the election they will remember mavericky winking. You can say that’s trivial. I’ll say that it’s human nature. Your product doesn’t have features that are more important than the ‘features’ being discussed in this election, yet, like most marketers, you’re obsessed with them. Forget it. The story is what people respond to.

Mainstream media isn’t powerful because we have no other choices (see below). It’s powerful because they’re still really good at writing and spreading stories, stories we listen to and stories we believe.

TV is over. If people are interested, they’ll watch. On their time (or their boss’s time). They’ll watch online, and spread the idea. You can’t email a TV commercial to a friend, but you can definitely spread a YouTube video. The cycle of ads got shorter and shorter, and the most important ads were made for the web, not for TV. Your challenge isn’t to scrape up enough money to buy TV time. Your challenge is to make video interesting enough that we’ll choose to watch it and choose to share it.

Permission matters (though selfish marketers still burn it). The Republican party has a long tradition of smart direct mail tactics. Over the years, they’ve used them to aggressively outfundraise and outcampaign the Democrats. In this election cycle, smart marketers at the Obama campaign toned down the spam and turned up the permission. They worked relentlessly to build a list, and they took care of the list. They used metrics to track open rates and (at least until the end) appeared to avoid burning out the list with constant fundraising. Anticipated, personal and relevant messages will always outperform spam. Regardless of how it is delivered.

Marketing is tribal. This one, for obvious reasons, fascinated me this cycle.
More

The ’08 election was a triumph for the likes of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr as voters chronicled their experiences in words, photos, and video.

By Arik Hesseldahl , Douglas MacMillan and Olga Kharif
Business Week 11/08

The 2008 contest for the White House may go down in history as the first social media election. How else to explain the unprecedented role the Web played in this year’s Presidential contest, an influence scarcely imaginable just four years ago? In 2004 many social networking sites were just getting off the blocks. YouTube, for example, was introduced early the following year. And microblogging sites like Twitter wouldn’t emerge until the 2008 Presidential campaign was getting under way.

It’s not just that individual voters had access to a wider range of information about candidates and their positions on issues. Unlike in any other Presidential election, the electorate could harness a panoply of social media tools—blogs, social networks, photo and video sharing sites—to broadcast to the world their thoughts about the candidates and their experiences of the electoral process.
More

Unprecedent Online Outreach Expected

From The Washington Post-11/9/2008

By Shailagh Murray and Matthew Mosk

CHICAGO — Armed with millions of e-mail addresses and a political operation that harnessed the Internet like no campaign before it, Barack Obama will enter the White House with the opportunity to create the first truly “wired” presidency.

Obama aides and allies are preparing a major expansion of the White House communications operation, enabling them to reach out directly to the supporters they have collected over 21 months without having to go through the mainstream media.

Just as John F. Kennedy mastered television as a medium for taking his message to the public, Obama is poised to transform the art of political communication once again, said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist who first helped integrate the Internet into campaigning four years ago.

“He’s going to be the first president to be connected in this way, directly, with millions of Americans,” Trippi said.

The nucleus of that effort is an e-mail database of more than 10 million supporters. The list is considered so valuable that the Obama camp briefly offered it as collateral during a cash-flow crunch late in the campaign, though it wound up never needing the loan, senior aides said. At least 3.1 million people on the list donated money to Obama.

Millions more made up the volunteer corps that organized his enormous rallies, registered millions of voters and held countless gatherings to plug the senator to friends and neighbors. On Election Day, they served as the backbone of Obama’s get-out-the-vote operation, reaching voters by phone and at the front door, serving coffee at polling stations and babysitting so parents could stand in line at voting precincts.

After Obama declared victory, his campaign sent a text message announcing that his supporters hadn’t heard the last from the president-elect. Obama conveyed a similar message to his staff in a campaignwide conference call Wednesday, signaling that his election was the beginning, and not the culmination, of a political movement.

Accordingly, the president-elect’s http://www.change.gov transition Web site features a blog and a suggestion form, signaling the kinds of direct and instantaneous interaction that the Obama administration will encourage, perhaps with an eye toward turning its following into the biggest special-interest group in Washington.

Most of the experts refer to Web 2.0 as the Semantic Web where people have a voice in the process.  President Elect Obama’s team took this to heart and turned the methodology of Web 2.0 literally into what people will now refer to as “Obamathology”.

Volumes will now be written and reported on discussing how the campaign truly did give people a voice and empowered them with the tools to do so.  Web 2.0 is really nothing more than using tools that are out their and free for any business to use.  The challenge that most businesses face is that they too are afraid of change.  But…it was “change” in fact…that became the primary message of Obama campaign.  Recognizing this, they changed the way their team used media.

Rather than using traditional media, they used New Media…and while they didn’t invent anything new in terms of technology, they changed the tools and these new tools are what Web 2.0 is all about.  The campaign that got 2nd place in the Presidential race chose not to change and did things the same way failing brands are continuing to do them today.

Businesses that will succeed going forward need to understand the methodologies of Web 2.0.  Many experts are now beginning to refer to these changes as Obamathology for obvious reasons…they work!  So join in the conversation and focus on the power of Web 2.0…not the buzzword it has become.  Regardless of the outcome of the campaign…it did teach us an incredibly powerful lesson.

People want to be part of the process and have a voice.  Make them feel like they have a stake in your brand and your business can be part of the future instead of a statistic.