How CM & Web 2.0 Played Key Role in Winning White House

Analyzing One of the Most Successful Web 2.0 Deployments to Date

Silver Spring, MD (Gawkwire.com) According to this month’s cover story in Infonomics magazine (http://www.infonomicsmag.com), the Obama for America campaign was not just an extremely successful on-line political campaign, it was arguably one of the most successful Web 2.0 deployments to date.

"Barack Obama understood that since the last open presidential election in 2000, the technological revolution that has changed every aspect of American life had fundamentally realigned the power dynamic in politics as well," notes Washingtonian editor Garrett Graff and author of The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web and the Race for the White House. "So while Hillary Clinton and John McCain set out to run the last campaign all over again, Obama forged ahead and ran the first campaign of the 21st Century."

Download the Infonomics article “BARACK OBAMA: How Content Management and Web 2.0 Helped Win the White House - The Untold, Inside Story” at http://www.aiim.org/Obama-for-America-Internet-Campaign.aspx

In the article, Graff explains, “The sheer scale of his presidential bid dwarfed everything that came before it: The campaign surpassed some three million individual contributors—millions more than George W. Bush garnered as the sitting president in 2004; Obama’s Facebook page had more than three million ‘friends’—six times more than John McCain; and there were more than 100,000 supporter-organized events across the country. The campaign’s email list surged to more than 13 million addresses, larger than the combined size of the lists of the national Democratic party, MoveOn.org, and U.S. Sen. John Kerry. Indeed, the success of Obama’s fundraising effort was so unprecedented that by the final weeks of the campaign he was buying 30-minute blocks of national network television time and advertising in Xbox video games.”

AIIM President John Mancini will discuss the broader content management lessons learned from the Obama Web 2.0 initiative during his keynote address at the Info360 Show in Philadelphia on March 31. Mancini notes, “There are many things we can take from the 2008 campaign and view through the prism of any effective content management implementation. First, an effective content strategy must be just that – a strategy, not a series of tactics bolted onto an existing business. The implementation must be disciplined and conscious of exactly the outcomes it is trying to achieve, not just a reflection of the existing status quo. The objective of any content implementation, but especially one focused on Web 2.0 technologies, must be broad-based engagement, not just passive observation. And lastly, even though Web 2.0 strategies build much ‘unconventional’ content, the content must still be managed.”

Graff concludes, “What President Obama does with the technology platform and movement that grew up around candidate Obama is still an open question. As former Howard Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi says, ‘In 2004, we were the Wright Brothers and compared to us, Obama’s campaign was the Apollo moon shot. Now that he’s in the White House, though, he’s back to being the Wright brothers—the first networked president.’”

Download the Infonomics article “BARACK OBAMA: How Content Management and Web 2.0 Helped Win the White House - The Untold, Inside Story” at http://www.aiim.org/Obama-for-America-Internet-Campaign.aspx