Among the strongest elements Obama’s 2008 election campaign was the fact that it used innovative and unique new techniques that applied technology to raise funds from large corporations such as CommerceTel Corp., as well as Verizon Communications, Walt Disney, and other U.S. giants.
By using these methods to their fullest for the 2012 campaign, Obama should be able to raise $1 billion this time around. This is because campaigns that embrace the potential that technology has to offer will have a notable advantage over its competition.
In the last election, Obama’s advantage came from recognizing how much the internet could do for him, and by centralizing it in his campaign. The result was that Obama was able to appeal to the online market much more than McCain, regardless of their political platforms; a fact which had a major influence on the results of the election.
In the upcoming election, it isn’t just the online presence that candidates will be considering, but the mobile optimized presence. Indeed, the tactics from Obama’s previous campaign appealed to the younger voters with its search engine optimized BarackObama.com site that was supported by sizeable marketing campaigns.
Now, that same demographic is accessing the internet through different channels, so candidates will have to consider making their internet presence easily accessible on smartphones and tablets. In this vein, it is clear that Obama’s web advisory group has already had some foresight.
The website is always being pumped full of fresh new relevant content, with new speech transcripts, public appearance videos, PowerPoint presentations of proposed plans for budgets, and other content all added on a daily basis. Not to mention the tremendous social media presence that has been built up on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube over the years that he has been in office.
Now, the team is focusing on mass text-messaging to a degree that no other candidate has ever met. They are taking advantage of the way that SMS texts can reach a tremendous number of people in a very time-sensitive way, engaging the recipient immediately.