Interesting enough, during the first MIS class, we touch a little bit about how our own politican embark on technology with the hope of winning trust (and votes) of the rakyat. True enough, that's what many politicians in many other countries wanted to do as well..digital marketing and whatever you can find on the Internet, they do what it takes to win their campaigns.
The propellation of the Internet as a main weapon to win voters is not something new, but during Obamamania, we see how he puts it to his advantage and put himself in the class of his own.
It was, the web wot won it. Barack Obama's election was one in which the world felt involved and it wasn't just because of the historic nature of the election or the power of the job.
Obama's campaign team is everywhere online: YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook, and his team worked for the campaign as early as the year before the actual election begun.
They mobilised supporters and organised communities, registering 1.5 million volunteers through myBarackObama.com and raising $600m from 3 million people.
Obama's campaign also built a consensual database of 3m mobile numbers by promising that in return, supporters would get campaign news before the media.
And so they did almost immediately with the announcement of Joe Biden as vice-presidential candidate. It was a masterclass in political campaigning - a high water mark.
Why I said its masterclass? Obama managed to pull off intimate discussions with major donors over dinner, posted to the campaign's YouTube account. He's just a fantastic political communicator. There's no sense of artifice - just a melding of the candidate and the human being.
The web is built on technology that is primarily for communication, and not publishing. That dynamic is the source of its power and, crucially, its intimacy. What social media represents - and what fed Obama's victory - is a direct engagement and communication between friends, contacts and families.
When ideas, opinions and information are shared, they become part of that intimate, trusted network in the small corner of the internet. The people's subconscious is hard-wired to assume that faces that they see regularly are their own friends (explaining their preoccupation with celebrity), and so they feel that they know Obama because they've spent so much time with him.
The web has helped to inspire and empower a generation that has rejected political apathy. Obama's team used technology to make issues personal and relevant by giving people ownership of the campaign. It wasn't a complicated strategy.
So what makes his campaign work?
The use of technology like blogs, mass texting and online phone banks has been key to Obama's surprise sweep.
His campaign has been making use of a range of technologies -- from ringtones to SMS -- to inspire Obamamania. And it's working. They've been using [texting] to get out the vote, which is incredibly smart because it gives people a way to take immediate political action. It's just what mobile technology is suited for.
Obama was not the only candidate whose campaign is using online technology and mobile phones, but his has been one of the most effective in its embrace of new tech strategies.
Obama supporters who signed up with the candidate received a text message reminding them to vote. The text message included a phone number to help them find their polling station, a key feature that helped get out the vote.
Other campaigns have experimented with texting, but haven't been as effective, Germany says. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards' campaign used text messaging to notify supporters of a televised speech. Germany, co-author of a study on the use of mobile phone technology in politics, says Edwards' campaign might as well as have used e-mail.
The Obama campaign organized volunteers to make thousands of phone calls to get out the vote using an online phone-banking tool.
The online success of the Barack Obama campaign involves proven methods of the new Internet political process as well as high-power thinkers from multiple fields. Featured individuals of an article in today’s Wired blog describe the success of the Obama campaign’s Web strategy and its volunteer training structure.
My.BarackObama.com, the Democratic presidential nominee’s social networking site, houses the Neighbor-to-Neighbor tool. It empowers individuals by enabling them to find out where to canvass and encourage voters.
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