Mastering the Social Network

Here’s an interesting article in Technology Review published by MIT about how the Obama Campaign leveraged social networking to win the race to his party’s nomination.  Of particular value are the statistics about audience trends in new media and the approach the campaign took to managing their new media strategies.
Throughout the political season, the Obama campaign has domi¬nated new media, capitalizing on a confluence of trends. Americans are more able to access media-rich content online; 55 percent have broadband Internet connections at home, double the figure for spring 2004. Social-networking technologies have matured, and more Americans are comfortable with them. Although the 2004 Dean campaign broke ground with its online meeting technologies and blogging, “people didn’t quite have the facility,” says ¬Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor who has given the Obama campaign Internet policy advice (Lessig wrote The People Own Ideas! in our May/June 2005 issue). “The world has now caught up with the technology.” The Obama campaign, he adds, recognized this early: “The key networking advance in the Obama field operation was really deploying community¬-building tools in a smart way from the very beginning.”
Of course, many of the 2008 candidates had websites, click-to-donate tools, and social-networking features–even John McCain, who does not personally use e-mail. But the Obama team put such technologies at the center of its campaign–among other things, recruiting 24-year-old Chris Hughes, cofounder of Facebook, to help develop them. And it managed those tools well. Supporters had considerable discretion to use MyBO to organize on their own; the campaign did not micromanage but struck a balance between top-down control and anarchy. In short, Obama, the former Chicago community organizer, created the ultimate online political machine.
To read the full article, go to http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/21222/?nlid=1283&a=f