The Winning Election Strategy – Social Media

For the last few months I have to admit, I’ve been obsessed. By politics. And while I had particular emotional, moral and principled reasons for my obsession, what really grabbed me was the way that the presidential campaign played out over the Net, through specific campaign activities but also social media and countless homegrown viral efforts.

I think its fair to say that one of the main downfalls of the McCain campaign was their lack of understanding when it comes to the power of the Internet. This permeated everything from McCain’s own brand (he admitted he didn’t bother to use email), to their lack of foresight to how the Net would take any gaffe and make it bigger.

It all starts with brand. Obama had that in spades.

Since work has recently overtaken me (we’re preparing for our annual user conference), and since there are a multitude of excellent articles on the strategy behind the Obama campaign, I’ll leave you with some good starting points to find out more on how this truly was the social media election:

• The Vote: A Victory for Social Media, too
• Barack Obama, will you tap the groundswell?
• Obama election ushers in first Internet presidency
• No rest for the Web’s election weary
• Twitter, etc. - A lodestar for the ‘08 race
• The Facebook Election
• Tweet! Social network a-twitter over election
• YouTube, a battleground for presidential politics
• Web 2.0 and the Internet delivered the vote for Obama
• Favored Obama address features http not 1600
• Keen on new media: did the Internet elect Obama?

And I’ll leave you with a few more…

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Media Equation: How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power
• Commentary: GOP needs Obama’s Web savvy
• How Social Media Helped Obama Get to the White House
• How Social Media Shaped The Presidential Campaign
• The First Social Media President

Tagged as: Barack Obama presidential campaign 2008, facebook, Politics, social media, twitter, youtube