Obama Benefits from Brilliant Internet Strategy

Vermonters are used to volunteering for candidates during the New Hampshire primary where our work can mean something; our own primary doesn’t normally amount to much. This year is different. Our primary votes will count—either helping Barack Obama maintain or expand his delegate lead over Hillary Clinton or, if Clinton wins, helping to slow Obama’s momentum.

Obama is projected to win in Vermont. Part of the reason for this is that his campaign has been out-front in organizing, asking for support, and calling people to remind them to vote, even here in our tiny state. Online tools and a brilliant Internet strategy has aided the campaign’s grass roots organizing activities and enabled them to put boots in the ground where they count. Wired offers a glimpse at how Obama’s Internet strategy has paid off for his campaign “Inside Obama’s Surging Net-Roots Campaign”. Here’s a glimpse:

Champion [an Obama volunteer in Texas] is just one cog in a massive grass-roots get-out-the vote effort undertaken by the Obama campaign in the potentially decisive states of Ohio and Texas, where voters go to the polls Tuesday. At the center of it all is a hub of online networking tools enabling a wide spectrum of volunteers all over the country to get together in self-organized groups to help their candidate.

From controlling the canvassing operations to corralling e‑mail lists, organizing meetings and overseeing national phone drives, Obama’s web network is the most ambitious, and apparently successful, internet campaign effort in any presidential race in the web’s short history.

In addition to its finesse at using the Internet to scale up organizing, much has been made of the fact that Obama’s campaign has raised money online in thousands of small contributions, unlike the Clinton campaign, whose contributions tended to come in large chunks from a few wealthy donors. And of course, can we forget YouTube? It was an Obama staffer who created the anti- Hillary commercial as a mashup of Apple’s famous 1984 ad for the Macintosh (and lost his job with the campaign when it was released on YouTube and received national coverage and millions of views).