Obama Campaign's Use of Social Networking

      The Obama campaign gained an advantage over both Clinton's and McCain's by effectively using social networking. Unlike campaigns before this 55% of Americans had broadband internet connections at home. Other campaigns also used web tools but did not make them a central part of the campaign. The Obama campaign even hired Chris Hughes who was a co-founder of Facebook to help design mybarakobama.com. The website made it easy to manage and organize large number of supporters as well as set up events.

      Clintons campaign used social networking well but did not focus on new media at first. In the beginning they focused more on large donations. Seeing the campaign receive checks for millions of dollars makes people who would give smaller donations feel like their money is not needed. however the Obama campaign made 48% of its funds in donations less that $200 while the Clinton campaign made 33% in small donations. Clinton focused on the baby boomers demographic and told people to visit her website. However the Obama website was constantly putting links to media made by the supporters. A music video set to an Obama speech got over 10 million views on YouTube.

      Then there was McCain whos site was poorly made and did not attract new users very well. McCain tried to use the internet while targeting and older generation. most people under 25 don't even use emails any more. The Obama campaign used text messages with valuable information in less than 160 characters whereas the McCain campaign didn't use and SMS strategy at all.
      Using these strategies the Obama campaign was able to dominate Facebook, Myspace, and overall website traffic. These methods were able to get an extra 1 million people voting. This is ground breaking and is expected to get more people to vote in the future.