Obama surfs web to White House
2008-11-05 07:47
Washington - Did Barack Obama's MySpace and Facebook friends help put him in the White House? Did he Twitter his way to the top?
Social networks and Twitter messages may have helped but analysts agree it was the Democrat's impressive online organisation and internet fund-raising that fuelled his victory over Republican John McCain in Tuesday's election.
"No one's going to say Obama won the election because of the internet but he wouldn't have been able to win without it," said Julie Germany, director of George Washington University's Institute for Politics Democracy & the internet.
"From the very beginning the Obama campaign used the internet as a tool to organise all of its efforts online and offline," Germany told AFP. "It was like the central nervous system of the campaign."
Both campaigns used the web for fund-raising but Obama with considerably more success, pulling in tens of millions of dollars more than McCain online.
Both campaigns had similarly slick official websites, cultivated bloggers and made heavy use of YouTube, creating their own channels on the video-sharing site which did not even exist four years ago to help push their message.
Very sophisticated, elaborate database
But the Obama campaign took its efforts one step further, creating a massive grass-roots online network of volunteers.
"When people think of Barack Obama on the internet, they think of all of the fancy videos that people have been creating, they think of mybarackobama.com, the text messaging," Germany said.
"But it's really that backend system that nobody sees that has been an essential part of the campaign.
"What we're talking about is a very sophisticated, very elaborate database that allowed the Obama campaign to micro-target all of its efforts online and offline," she said.
"They used emails to communicate with people with messages relevant to their districts and relevant to the issues that they cared about and to organize and mobilize get-out-the-vote efforts," Germany said.
"Obama understood the power of the network that he built to support his campaign," said Micah Sifry, co-founder of techpresident.com, a blog about politics and the web.
"He understood the power of individuals self-organising in support of his campaign," he said.
Power of connecting people
David Almacy, who served as the internet and e-communications director in the White House from March 2005 to May 2007, noted that early on the Obama campaign brought on board Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook.
"They understood from the very beginning this concept of connecting the dots socially online," said Almacy.
"I don't know it for a fact but I can't imagine that Senator Obama was checking his Facebook page every day," Almacy said. "I don't think he was probably Twittering.
"The point though is not whether the candidates themselves were using it, but that their campaigns understood the power of connecting people in those venues," he said.
"A lot of what the Obama campaign did online was trying to encourage people to do something for the campaign," said Germany.
"It was not about passively absorbing information."
"From the very beginning the Obama audience tended to be younger, more web-savvy," said Germany. "The internet was a natural tool for them to use to reach that supporter base.
"The McCain campaign felt their base of support was different," she said.
'Friending' Obama on Facebook
"This was one of the reasons why they defended not doing as much flashy stuff online, because they said our base of support isn't comfortable with social networking sites, probably doesn't hang out on Facebook."
Almacy, who brought RSS feeds, email updates, audio podcasts and on-demand video to whitehouse.gov while serving in the Bush White House, said he will be watching with interest what an Obama administration does with the internet.
"It's a lot more difficult," he said. "A campaign is centred around one day, you're pushing to that one day. Government is not focused on one day. It's more of a long-term approach."
Almacy also said that people who may have "friended" candidate Obama on their MySpace or Facebook pages may think twice about "friending" President Obama.
"It's one thing to give your money and support to the campaigns, but another once you have an official elected person sitting in that Oval Office," he said.
"All the privacy concerns start to pop up, regardless of who the candidate is," Almacy said. "People say, 'Wait a minute, do I really want the federal government to have access to all of this information?'"