The Conclusion of a six-part series, which will be collected into an e-book and released in early July. Cross-posted on e.politics

As the presidential race heated up, the internet grew from being the medium of a core group of political junkies to a gateway for millions of ordinary Americans to participate in the political process, donating odd amounts of their spare time to their candidate through online campaign tools. Obama's campaign carefully designed its web site to maximize group collaboration, while at the same time giving individual volunteers tasks they could follow on their own schedules.

“Propelled by Internet, Barack Obama Wins Presidency,” Sarah Lai Stirland, Wired.com, 11/4/2008

For all their zeal and the sophistication of the tools they had at hand, Obama's supporters weren't the only ones active online in 2008, nor was he the only candidate willing to trust ordinary people to carry his message. Ron Paul's supporters made an early splash, swarming internet discussion groups and the comments sections of national news outlets.

Cross-posted on e.politics

What matters at the polls? The candidate, the message, and the moment: everything else just sets the stage. You can have every endorsement in the state, tons of money in the bank, a flashy online volunteer-mobilization center (see screen-capture below), the endless attention of political observers around the country -- and still lose badly.

In this year's Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary, Terry McAuliffe's national prominence and fundraising prowess had one measurable outcome: he spent $90 for every vote he received, and no doubt made a lot of local television stations very happy in the process.

Part Five of a six-part series, cross-posted on e.politics

Obama's platform may have envisioned a grand reform of the political system, but the primary change he brought to political fundraising was to do more of it than anyone in history:

3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. The average online donation was $80, and the average Obama donor gave more than once...Obama also raised millions from traditional campaign bundlers -- rich, well-connected fundraisers -- but the bulk of the more than $600 million that Obama raised throughout the campaign was through the Internet, aides said. (Some of those bundlers, of course, also arranged for donations to be made online, so there is some overlap.)

"Obama Raised Half a Billion Online," Jose Antonio Vargas, Washington Post, 11/20/2008

Cross-posted on e.politics

Fascinating experience a few days ago -- I got to do a presentation/discussion about online fundraising with a group of Democractic state-level staff, most in their 20s and 30s and most affiliated with state parties, state legislative caucuses and the like. The upshot: man, does it seem as though that world has changed since I worked for a member of the Texas Legislature in the early 1990s, and judging from this experience, we're on the verge of a real explosion of online state-level U.S. politics.

Cross-posted on e.politics

Remember the "Twitter Revolution" in Moldova? Even as it was unfolding, the Twitter angle was being downgraded in the face of evidence that the Moldovan protesters seemed to be using just about EVERY online tool available -- from Facebook to text messages to blogs and email newsletters -- to organize and spread the word (of course, it didn't help when it turned out that very few people in Moldova are even ON Twitter). Now, according to The Post and Slate's Anne Applebaum, the very "revolution" itself is being called into question, and online social media may have been used by the state security apparatus to misinform both locals and outside observers about what was going on.

Cross-posted on e.politics

A classic observation from the early days of online marketing: a website is NOT a strategy. I.e., when you ask the client what they're trying to do online, and they reply that they have a website -- which is of course just a tool, and is probably not doing them much good if it's isolated from an actual plan to put it to use.

The Twitter fixation currently sweeping segments the news media and the political world (particularly on the Republican side) reminds me of those innocent days of the early web. Not to put Twitter down, because it definitely has valuable uses, but it's just a tool -- and if you don't know WHY you're using it, you're probably not going to get much out of it.

Part Four of a six-part series, cross-posted on e.politics

Attracting the largest army of supporters ever seen in a modern American election is one thing, but even more impressive is that the Obama campaign managed to put them to work -- as online recruiters, as cash machines, but also as organizers, block-walkers and pro-Obama voices in their own communities. A critical problem for anyone running for office: if all you ask volunteers to do when they show up at your campaign headquarters is to stuff envelopes, their ranks are likely to melt away like the morning dew as they find better uses for their time. The Obama solution: borrow their brains, and use technology to make it possible. In part, this was through the MyBarackObama.com toolset:

Part Three of a six-part series, cross-posted on e.politics

With a team in place and technology under development, the Obama campaign wasted no time in building their most important resource: the list of volunteers who would work to elect the Illinois senator president. And just as the campaign would use new media tools to encourage voter turnout and other action in the real world, they employed real-world events to build their list of online activists:

Part Two of a six-part series, cross-posted on e.politics

Structure isn't sexy -- but to talk about the critical online tools of 2008 without discussing the framework that governed their use would be missing the most important part of the story. ANYONE could employ (most of) the technology the Obamans used, but very few online communicators have ever done so either as effectively or on such a scale. One important lesson from Obama: the tools don't matter as much as how you use them.

Part One of a six-part series, cross-posted on e.politics

Without the internet, Barack Obama would still be the junior senator from Illinois. Instead, his two-year campaign for the White House relied on electronic communications to an unprecedented extent for its core functions: organizing volunteers and staff, finding new supporters and putting them to work, turning out voters on election day and (of course) raising staggering amounts of money -- all contributing to a crucial edge in the primary and general elections.