How Obama Used Web 2.0

Obama for America wasn’t just the most successful online political campaign; it was arguably the most successful Web 2.0 deployment to date. Here’s the inside story of how it all worked.

The campaign had 57 separate MySpace profiles, as well as presences (both official and unofficial) on Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Eventful, LinkedIn, BlackPlanet, Faith- Base, Eons, Glee, MiGente, MyBatanga, AsianAve, and the Democratic National Committee’s own Partybuilder platform. Whereas four years prior Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s presidential campaign ran just two websites—its official one and the campaign blog—Obama’s team oversaw more than a hundred different websites from MySpace to FightTheSmears.org. This vast Web presence helped spread the campaign message even on the microblogging site Twitter.com, where Obama amassed some quarter million “followers.”