Friday, November 21, 2008

The Obama revolution

Barack Obama may not be President yet but he has already revolutionized politics. He internet based campaign was several orders of magnitude more advanced then anything done previously. Patrick Rufini runs the numbers.

Jose Antonio Vargas breaks down some monumental numbers.

13 million e-mail addresses.

$500 million raised online.

6.5 million donations from 3 million donors with an average donation of $80.

3.2 million Facebook friends (to John McCain's 600,000).

2 million My.BarackObama.com profiles created.

One million participants in Obama's cell phone text messaging program -- this is less than the 6-8 million rumored but still massive.

400,000 volunteer blog posts written. 200,000 volunteer events created. 35,000 local and affinity groups created by supporters.

Three million volunteer phone calls made in the last four days of the election through the website without supporters having to step into a campaign headquarters.

The campaign had a full time chief technology officer in addition to a new media director. They had a full time analytics team whose job was to do nothing else but monitor site data.

Have a look at young Amy introducing the my.barackobama.com website. It blew me away.



This is completely different from the branch structure of current Australian parties. The question becomes why do we need formal branches? The parties who don't run with this technology are doomed to extinction.

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