Obama started his new campaign… and every single Social Media Consultant on this planet will be watching, analysing, commenting and tweeting about every little step of the campaign.
And it could well turn into a big one. Apparently, they’re trying to raise more then one billion dollars this time.
They’re starting with a 2 minute video called „It Begins With Us“.
At the grassroot level it’s individuals talking with individuals – and making a difference.
Obama’s social and online media campaign were exemplary, indeed. Now we would obviously like to see the stats and results. Here is a short list of the first sites listing results or impressions of the Obama campaign:
A simple Google count showing that Obama’s campaign achieved to a lot more Google links in the last few years, than George Bush in his 9 years of term.
The concept behind these types of services is that by letting users suggest ideas and vet them via a community voting process, you’ll be left with only the ideas that your most loyal customers really want – and that these are things that are most likely to succeed in the marketplace.
The idea is basically the same as for „my starbucks idea„, „dell ideastorm“ or even „tchibo ideas“ (in Germany). Everybody can submit an idea, users then vote on the ideas, comment&discuss, etc. Apparently, the idea was born out of necessity, but I don’t quite fathom why people might think that Obama has not reached out to the online audience sufficiently enough (as it says in this article).
While I think he does well using all these social media tools, his new platform has one critical flaw as a commenter to one of my previous posts on this type of crowd sourcing noted: the same way users can see the new ideas (and vote&comment), so can his political opponents. And the might see in which direction his campaign topics could be targeted.
Nevertheless, I sometimes wish German politicians would increasingly use these tools…
Wo ich sonst so bin...