Sam Graham-Felsen

“Internet key to Obama victories” – BBC

“Propelled by Internet, Barack Obama Wins Presidency” – Wired

The single most important thing the Obama new media team did was recognize the power of ordinary, organized people. We used technology to help them organize, but it was the grassroots who elected Obama, not the tools. To learn more about how Obama’s online strategy can be applied to your work, check out my speaking and seminar services.

Here is a look at some of the record-breaking numbers from the 2008 campaign:

• $500 million dollars raised online in mostly small donations, 2/3 of all money raised in the election
• 13 million people on our email list, by far the largest list in political history, nearly quadruple the previous Democratic nominee’s list
• 200,000 offline events created by our supporters using my.BarackObama.com
• 1 billion minutes of online video consumed on our YouTube channel

So how did this happen?

It’s important to take a step back and remember the challenges we were facing in 2006. Barack Obama had only been a Senator for two years; he was still widely unknown, and many people questioned whether someone with name and appearance like his could ever win.

And he faced tremendous challengers. Hillary Clinton was perhaps the most powerful establishment candidate in history — with incredible name recognition, global fame, and deep connections to the traditional party elites and major fundraisers. The media had all but declared her a victor when she announced her candidacy.

Lacking early institutional support, Obama knew that his only tenable strategy was to run a campaign from the bottom-up — one that empowered millions of ordinary people to take the campaign into their own hands. And he knew that the Internet was going to be a critical ingredient in mobilizing this movement.

Our task was to create a compelling narrative that would inspire people to join our movement, drive them to take meaningful actions that would impact the campaign in a concrete way, and continually refine our relationships with our supporters through testing, data analysis, and intelligent targeting.

Obama’s early work as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago influenced everything we did — from telling authentic stories of our grassroots supporters, to equipping people with the tools and training to attend and host events and become leaders in their own neighborhoods.

Our message, all along, was simple: this campaign is about you. And we showed it, by trusting and investing in the grassroots, empowering them with new technologies, and telling meaningful stories about the impact of their participation. Because we put people ordinary people at the forefront of our campaign, we were able to build something much larger than a campaign — a movement.



Learn more about the Obama campaign’s new media strategy and how it can be applied to your organization. As Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith, authors of The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change write, “Although Obama’s social media team may have achieved the most ambitious and most successful social networking movement to date, its efforts also provide keen insights and simple lessons that can be applied to any campaign, including yours.”

Contact me about my speaking and seminar services.