barack kicks ass

At World WIde Creative, we’re pretty stoked that Barack Obama won. Partly because he’s of African descent, partly because the guy rocks the house, and partly because he brings a fresh breeze to a world smogged up with serious issues.

We have one more selfish reason for being elated for the win, however. World Wide Creative uses Barack Obama’s internet strategy as a case study in almost all our presentations, so it would have been pretty crappy if the non-internet-savvy old white guy had won!

Anyhow, here we are. President 2.0. A big question now is: Will Obama continue in the vein he’s started? He’s got a legion of followers on Twitter, an avid newsletter database, a record-breaking list of mobile numbers, and an unprecedented number of YouTube videos for a politician.

A promising sign is the new website / blog set up with the auspicious title: Change.gov

…and then there’s this list that’s doing the rounds. ‘50 things you didn’t know about Barack Obama‘, sharing things like his basketball court he’s introducing to the White House, that he’s a Macboy, that he benches 200lbs and he’s a big Fugees and Harry Potter fan.

Oh, and by the way, Barack Obama won a grammy in 2006.

For real.

However, it is Obama’s use of the web to build loyalty amongst current and new supporters that has really been a story worth telling.

The Wall Street Journalran a piece last month that highlighted Obama’s online success where he and his staff relied on building an online community, www.barackobama.com, to help supporters find one another and to disperse the campaign’s messages to a broad audience – fast and efficiently.

Additionally, Technology Review argued, that most of the other candidate’s campaigns (Hillary and McCain), as well as corporate companies and medium-sized businesses, had access to the same technology and tools and didn’t have anywhere near the online success of Obama!

So, what was his recipe for success? It’s simple (and it’s something that we at World Wide Creative preach to everyone we bump into – even on national TV!) – :

“Technology is only the accelerator & only ONE component of a successful online campaign; how that technology is positioned in relation to your message and how appropriate it is for your target market demographic is the secret sauce!”

Thing is, Obama’s success can be replicated - maybe not in terms of numbers (Obama gets +-2.5million unique visitors per month ) – but in terms of getting the most from your target audience through using AND UNDERSTANDING the appropriate online technologies.

Well done Barack! Well done for teaching us a thing or 2 about balancing technologies in relation to strategies.

PS. One of the guys heading up Obama’s online strategy is Chris Hughes. Don’t know who he is? Well he’s one of the guys that started a humble social networking platform that some of you might’ve heard off – Facebook… kinda makes a case for getting experts involved in your online projects, doesn’t it !?

On the side, we gave Louis his word, which was ‘Ice Cream’ but he didn’t manage to slip it in. My word in my interview with Peter Ndoro a few weeks ago was ‘Venezuela’ which I got in after the first 30 seconds, check it out. Louis did, however, manage to touch his ear, which was for his wife (awww).

Louis – good to see you got your priorities right…!