As a web and social media consultant, I am always on the lookout for pioneering communications strategies that share valuable lessons on how to effectively use social media to feed ongoing conversations with consumers and ultimately deliver results. And this is where my interest - and respect - for Barack Obama and his campaign sits. Not only did he passionately campaign offline, penetrating the hearts and minds of the American community, but he brought these interactions, opportunities and messages online, in turn harnessing the very nature that is social media - conversation and community.
 
Barack Obama launched an integrated online campaign that communicated his values, message of change and commitment to the US public through the execution of an interactive, engaging and highly personal online marketing strategy that ultimately affected his supporters’ conversations on the Internet; a conversation that grew like a virus and ultimately affected the US public’s voting decisions.
 
One of the most striking activities that Obama facilitated was proactively sharing information and insight about his campaign’s movements, thoughts and actions, in turn building community interaction and handing over ownership of his campaign to the community. He did this by focusing on reaching a wide an audience on the web as possible using numerous pre-existing social networks and tools including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube. However, he didn’t stop there and opened up his online campaign to penetrate smaller, more targeted communities such as BlackPlanet, Faithbase, AsianAve, Eons and Migente. And he did this through a genuine efforts to engage with people on a one-on-one basis.
 
Over and above this, Barack Obama took arguably one of the most proactive and aggressive approaches to online reputation management, dealing with the rumours spreading about him across the Internet. The most popular of these include that he is secretly a Muslim and that he was born in Kenya. How did he manage to handle this so well? With the launch of fightthesmears.com, and by enlisting millions of his supporters to help put an end to what he called the lies.
 
Barack Obama’s campaign offers an important lesson in how social media and networking strategies can empower people and their online networks to help execute a campaign that resonates on both a personal, targeted level and across a wide variety of demographics, interests and beliefs. And this is where the genius sits that marketers and communicators
should take note of: by empowering communities with information, you allow them to become your brand (or campaign) ambassadors. As Obama understood, it’s about letting go of control, believing in a product (or message), and letting the power of word of mouth reign.
 
Obama recognised this and is subsequently succeeding.