Oh Boy Obama – crowd sourced campaigning

von Roland Hachmann | Mai 31, 2008 | Blog, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Social Media Marketing

Barack Obama seems to utilize quite a few social media tools, having many speeches published on youtube, twittering, and of course blogging and a facebook profile. Now he has launched a crowd sourcing platform „oh boy obama„, on which people can vote for projects during his presidency, once he wins the election.

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…