Power of Internet charted Obama's landslide victory

IF THE US election in 2008 has proven anything, it's that whoever has the upper hand in using the Internet to his or her advantage will probably walk away with a victory. More than newspapers, television, phone calls, or to do door to door canvassing, the Internet has both energised and mobilised voters like never before in the US, and in the process it has proven to be a tool that no candidate can fail to master going forward.

"The Internet is the new television as far as 21st century campaigning is concerned," says Walter Anderson, contributing editor of FamilySecurityMatters.org. More than television, though, Anderson notes, the Internet has proven that it has the ability to allow candidates to reach "a larger audience of more potential voters" more immediately and with greater interactivity than television ever could.

But Obama went far beyond the Howard Dean model of using the Internet simply as a means to collect money. "The real Obama story is that he's used the Internet as a complete campaign strategy, not just to raise money," says Michael Malbin, executive director of Washington DC based Campaign Finance Institute.

Obama always leverage the so called Web 2.0 technologies of social networking, user generated content, blogging, and message boarding to involve voters in the process like no candidate before him. The site gets so much traffic that message postings frequently get thousands of responses each.

Generate that kind of involvement especially from the younger generation, which is tuned in digitally anyway and a lot of the other Internet-based work gets done for you. . Not sponsored by Obama, through the power of the Internet the song was ultimately viewed by millions of people around the world, and had a massive impact.



There is little doubt that the success of Obama's campaign in generating both support and money over the Internet will be viewed as a model of what must be done to compete effectively in future elections. That will place the Internet and by extension, the people who participate in it from the front and center in elections to come.



DPA