Case Study for the Barack Obama Campaign
Case Study for the Barack Obama Campaign The Barack Obama Campaign case shows how the Internet, especially social media can leverage its power to reach and encourage publics engage with communication and activities of the organization fast and cost-effectively. In the period of 2008 presidential election, Obama and his official team Obama for America (OAF for short) ran a web-based grassroots campaign and used social media as a tool to interact with supports timely, and enhance Obama’s reputation and impact. The social networking site my. BarackObama. om (MyBo for short) was designed to mobilize and organize volunteers and offered a platform for supports to plan events and interact with each other both online and in real world. MyBo users can directly engage with Obama’s messages and pass them along to their friends. In terms of the campaign’s leadership, because all users in MyBo might be representable, MyBo can function as a semiofficial site to response questions from reports and the public, get feedbacks from supports, and mobilize and organize volunteers. The goal of the campaign was simply but clear: let Barack Obama be elected as the president.
And the key objectives of MyBo were to attract more eligible voters and raise funds. Therefore, OFA took advantage of the online community –MyBo where supporters could build their blogs, organize local events, create fundraising sites, connect with official staff and offer their feedbacks directly. The salient point OFA created was to choose the appropriate medium to reach the audiences and manage the relationship with them. The demographics of social media users tended to fall in line more closely with those of Democratic voters in 2008 presidential election (see Exhibit for 2008 presidential Election Voter Demographics, from Exit Polls).
Social media had a high penetration among the younger generation while young adults aged 18 to 29 had a significant impact during the presidential election, according to the exhibit. MyBo, as well as Flickr, YouTube, and other sites, aims to convey Obama’s core beliefs to the followers, offered them a forum to plan events and find local political groups, and integrated offline activities into online experiences. Users could use MyBo blogs to facilitate offline events and outreach offline activities through sharing the experiences and enthusiasm with other online users.
To deliver the messages in a convincing tone and make the campaign open to all were significant factors for the success of OFA. The sophistication of Obama Rapid Response Group was to manage the relationship between Obama and the media via the public. MyBo bloggers and volunteers in this group worked as the “communication committee” to answer reporter’s questions and eliminate the negative impact of bad press with sophisticated, fact-checked responses, which indicated the transparency and grassroots feature of the Obama campaign.
With the strategy of “Obama Everywhere”, OFA took advantage of other social networking such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter beyond its own controlled website and built a profile for Obama in order to reach more voters. With the leverage of Neighbor-to-Neighbor and Vote for Change, OFA creased their effectiveness to reach undecided voters and developed more registers. Besides, the database of these registers and their profile made it easier for OFA to measure their campaign. Exhibit 2008 presidential Election Voter Demographics, from Exit Polls
