Analysis of Obama Presidential Campaign from a Social Media Marketing perspective.

1. Digital Experience Marketing Assignment
Case study on Obama
Presidential Campaign
D. Vinoth Kumar.

2. Case study on Obama Presidential Campaign
Contents
Barak Obama’s Digital Marketing Campaign.....................................................................................3
Obama Campaign Statistics .............................................................................................................3
Obama’s Campaign.........................................................................................................................4
Right Team:....................................................................................................................................4
POST Framework ............................................................................................................................5
People........................................................................................................................................5
Objectives...................................................................................................................................5
Strategy......................................................................................................................................5
Technology .................................................................................................................................5
Focus on building Communities. Do not rely on Technologies............................................................6
Creation of Communities.................................................................................................................6
Groundswell Technology Test..........................................................................................................8
Groundswell’s Objectives: Listening, Talking, Energising ,Supporting and Embracing...........................8
Listening.....................................................................................................................................8
Talking........................................................................................................................................8
Energizing...................................................................................................................................9
Supporting..................................................................................................................................9
Storytelling through Blogs and Video ...............................................................................................9
Social Media Platforms..................................................................................................................10
Myspace...................................................................................................................................10
Facebook..................................................................................................................................11
Linked-In:..................................................................................................................................13
YouTube:..................................................................................................................................14
Twitter......................................................................................................................................16
Elev8 ........................................................................................................................................16
GLEE.........................................................................................................................................16
Migente....................................................................................................................................16
Asianave...................................................................................................................................17
BlackPlanet...............................................................................................................................18
References................................................................................................................................22

3. Case study on Obama Presidential Campaign
Barak Obama’s Digital Marketing Campaign
Barak Obama was a little known American politician in the early 2007, but he created history
when he went on to become the 44th President of United States and the first African American
to win the US presidential elections in the late 2008. One of the major factors that catapulted
the little known Barak Obama to the White House as US President was the effective use of
Social Media platforms and technology. Many experts have cited that the Obama Presidential
campaign’s online advocacy as one of the main reason for his victory.
Obama Campaign Statistics
Social Media Platforms: 15
Total Followers : 15 Million
Facebook: 3.2 Million
Twitter: 115,000
YouTube: 14 million hours of content was watched by viewers
YouTube Views: 50 million
E-mail sent: 1 Billion
Number of Unique E-mails: 8k- 10k emails
SMS Subscribers: 3 million
Number of Profile on the website www.my.barackobama.com: 2 million
Offline Events: 200,000
Blog Posts: 400,000
Volunteer Groups on the website: 35,000
Financial Donors: 3 million

4. Case study on Obama Presidential Campaign
Total Amount collected: USD 639 Million
Amount collected through www.my.barackobama.com: USD 30 million
Number of Fund raising pages on website: 70,000
Average Online donation: USD 80
Obama’s Campaign
Right Team:
Obama started working on the team composition and the strategy as early as January of 2007.
The campaign hired the best talent in the internet marketing at that point of time. The key
members of the Obama campaign were
 Joe Raspars: He founded the company called Blue State Digital that had managed the
campaign of Howard Dean’s run for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. After
joining the campaign he left the company to work on the content creation, organizing of
fund raising and other campaign activities. Blue State Digital was still actively engaged in
the execution of the Obama campaign. It worked on setting up the backbone of the
campaign: www.barackobama.com and www.my.barackobama.com (MyBO).
 Chris Hughes: 25 year old Chris was one of the co-founders of the most popular social
networking site Facebook.com Obama had contacted Hughes in early 2006 when
facebook initially allowed Politicians to have customized facebook pages.
 Sam Graham-Felsen: Another 25 years old who had managed the content and was the
director of the content team. He worked on how to tell the emotional stories of the
Obama’s supporters. Prior to this, Felsenhad worked as the writer at “Tha Nation”.

5. Case study on Obama Presidential Campaign
 Kate Albright-Hannah: An Emmy-award winningdocumentary filmmaker was hired as the
video director.
POST Framework
People: How will the campaign target the people? How the customers will engage? They target
people on the popular social networking site (15 sites). The Obama campaign got this right and
rewarded the existing followers to engage and create more followers and spread the awareness
of the campaign.
Objectives: The objectives were to create awareness, increase popularity rating of Obama,
raise funds for the campaign and covert the awareness into votes. The Obama campaign
achieved these objectives by providing followers with tools for creating and spreading
awareness, and for organizing offline events and fund raising events.
Strategy: The strategy helped them to target the right communities. They had worked on the
strategy well ahead of the elections.
Technology: They had focused their efforts towards 15 social networking sites and used their
websites as the integration tool for acting as the common platform for followers from different
social media platforms to interact. Social media sites that were used : Facebook, MySpace,
Linked-In, Eons, Black Planet, AsianAve, Flickr, Digg, Eventful, FaithBase, GLEE, MiGente, My
Batanga, DNC PartyBuilder and also YouTube.

6. Case study on Obama Presidential Campaign
Focus on building Communities. Do not rely on Technologies
One of the key highlights of the Obama campaign was that it focused on creating communities.
It did not rely heavily on the technologies that were popular at that time. Instead they focused
on building a strong sense of community among the followers. As the book Groundswell
mentions (Page 18) “In the groundswell, relationships are everything. The way people connect
with each other- the community that is created- determines how the power shifts”.
Creation of Communities
The website www.my.barackobama.com (MyBO) allowed the followersto create their own
profileson the website. It also allowed them to connect with other followersin the website and
chat with them. It allowedthem to organize offline events in the local areas, raise funds, download
tools, helped them with the content for organizing events, and also allowedregistered users to
search for any local events that were being organized by other members. MyBO had tons of
materials: speeches,posters, videos, debates, photos and how-to guides that were accessible to the
users and that also empowered them to create their own content for the campaign. MyBO site had
categorized the followers into three levels: Personal, Social and Advocate and rewarded the
members by giving them more access to materials as they progressed from one level to the other.
Personal level is when the users befriend Obama on the social networking sites. Social is when they
were allowed to interact with other members, create groups and comment on other MyBO profiles.
Advocate level is where the member actively participates by creating own content like blogs,
organizes events,creating videosand posting on youtube channels. MyBO website had the metrics
to track the activity index of the registered profiles and rewarded them with access to training
materials and key campaign tools. For example: When a volunteer signed up for organizing an

7. Case study on Obama Presidential Campaign
offline event for fund raising they were given access to the database containing potential
supporters. Users could search for the local potential supporters by just keying in the pin code.
In the traditional election campaign, the focus of the campaign is to get the 1) Votes for the
public and 2) Collect money. However, Obama campaign was able to take it to the next level by
asking for the “Time” of the followers.By creating a sense of community feeling,the campaign was
able to involve and engage people who were willingto devote their time and effort for taking the
campaign forward and creating more awareness and more followers. Obama’s political career as
the community organizer had helpedin bringing this elementto the campaign. Empowering and
engaging the followersis the ultimate goal for any brand and the Obama electoral campaign was
able to achieve this ultimate goal.
Image fromMy.BarackObama.Source: http://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/online-marketing-
essentials/s22-05-case-study-barack-obama-s-stra.html

8. Case study on Obama Presidential Campaign
Groundswell Technology Test
Let us evaluate the campaign using the “Groundswell technology test (page 36 and 37,
Groundswell”. The question that Groundswell technology test raises are
 Does it enable people to connect with each other in new ways?
 Is it effortless to sign up for?
 Does it shift power from institutions to the people?
 Does the community generate enough content to sustain itself?
 Is it an open platform that invitespartnerships?
The Obama campaign scores a YES on all the above questions thanks to the competent team that
Obama campaign had.
Groundswell’s Objectives: Listening, Talking, Energising ,Supporting and
Embracing
Listening:The campaign focused on reaching out to each communities and listeningto their
problems. For example, the campaign reached out the Disabled community through their social
network site called disaboom. Another example of listeningwas when the campaign decided to
enter Linked-In though Linked-In was thought to be republican by nature according to statistics.
They were keento listento the problems faced by business community-CEOs, Management heads,
Directors and Executives.
Talking: Campaign was interactive in nature and it allowed the followsto do the talking and to
create more awareness about the campaign. In the Linked-In campaign they were able to make the

9. Case study on Obama Presidential Campaign
corporate talk and were able to identifythe problems faced by them. They posted questions like
‘What are your suggestions for helping small business?’ and were able to make the business
community talk.
Energizing:Alsoalready mentioned, the campaign focused on rewarding the followers’activities
by carefully measuring their activitiesand rewarding them with more materials and access to
content.
Supporting:The followerswere supported with tools and how-to documents.
Embrace: They were able to embrace a large section of the community by allowing them to engage
and interact among themselves. The campaign members were actively reading and responding to
the comments and questions raised by the followerson the various social media sites.
Storytelling through Blogs and Video
In March 2007, Felsenwas hired by the campaign team specially for the purpose of tellingstories of
the events. As someone with a writing background, Felsenwas effective in communicating what the
campaign was doing in the form of blogs and videosand in communicating to the public that the
campaign was larger than Obama, how the campaign was an opportunity for the ordinary
individualsto participate and how people were getting involvedin the campaign.

10. Case study on Obama Presidential Campaign
Social Media Platforms
Myspace: https://myspace.com/barackobama

11. Case study on Obama Presidential Campaign
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/barackobama?q=barackobama
Photon Album: https://www.facebook.com/barackobama/photos_albums
Apart from the official page, there are a large number of groups that were created by followers.

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Life events and authentic information like the movies he likes,interest, music have been updated in
his facebook page.
Linked-In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/barackobama

14. Case study on Obama Presidential Campaign
YouTube:
2008 Election highlights: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1C63F57F90F0F330
http://www.youtube.com/user/BarackObamadotcom/about

15. Case study on Obama Presidential Campaign
This video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWe7wTVbLUU ) has been watched by more
than 7,182,546 so far.

16. Case study on Obama Presidential Campaign
Twitter: https://twitter.com/barackobama
Elev8.com: http://elev8.com/barack_Obama/
GLEE: www.glee.com/barack_Obama
Migente: http://www.migente.com/barack_Obama

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Asianave.com : http://www.asianave.com/barack_Obama/

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BlackPlanet: http://www.blackplanet.com/barack_Obama

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http://ww1.prweb.com/prfiles/2008/06/20/63402/ObamaFundraisingMapXPLANE.jpg

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Image source: http://www.infographicsarchive.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/08/Obama_Vs_Romney_Social_Deathmatch.jpg
References:
Claire Miller. “How Obama’s Internet Campaign Changed Politics”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/how-obamas-internet-campaign-changed-
politics/?_php=true&_type=blogs&pagemode=print%20&_r=0
Stirland, Sarah. “Propelled by Internet, BarackObama Wins Presidency”. Wired.com.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/11/propelled-by-in/
Stirland, Sarah. “Inside Obama's Surging Net-Roots Campaign”. Wired.com
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2008/03/obama_tools?currentPage=all
Using new media effectively: An analysis of Barack Obama’s Campaign aimed at youth
Americans.
http://www.academia.edu/1526998/Using_New_Media_Effectively_an_Analysis_of_Barack_
Obamas_Election_Campaign_Aimed_at_Young_Americans