my my myobama

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The kick-off speaker at this year's Enterprise 2.0 in Boston (June 23-25, 2009) did a fabulous job setting the bar high for others.

Of course, Jascha Franklin-Hodge is in the social media development business. His company (BlueStateDesign) offers design and strategy consulting and used the nation's biggest success in web 2.0 to great effect in his presentation. (If Obama-team paid for their services, extra great for F-H, but if not, it was still worth a great deal since it gave F-H's company such a huge dose of credibility to speak from).

Some stats on the Obama election campaign were shared:

• 1 billion email messages sent to 13 million addresses (an average of 77 messages/person - no doubt some got more, some got less)
• 1 million SMS accounts
• 200,000 off-line events planned
• 35,000 local volunteer groups
• 14.5 million YouTube hours of viewing (similar paid-for-advertising would have cost about $50 million)
• $770 million was raised

F-H said that email marketing was key... and I would hope so - 1 billion messages! Clean copy, simple and professional graphics and controlled corporate branding everywhere.

Website offered action-oriented payoffs - volunteer, make calls, learn more. The highest priority item had the biggest button for action.

As is the case with any community website such as Facebook, users tend to invest a lot of time tending their gardens, without necessarily accomplishing much. However, F-H and team made campaign-relevant activities worth points, and even integrated the accomplishment of activities (25 calls to undecided voters in VA, for example) with Facebook so a Obama Community member's Facebook friends knew that the member had accomplished something relevant to the campaign.

Even the iPhone application sorted and rank-ordered your contacts list according to whether or not the contact was in a swing state or not.

Members that achieved certain campaign participation levels were granted access to strategy videos that were real, nerdy campaign managers, low production value YouTube videos, further reinforcing the campaign's personal and authentic flavor.

Sarah Palin's RNC speech was the #1 fundraising speech for the Dems. Within 24 hours, they raised $11 million. Their outbound email accused her of being mean-spirited and demeaning of community organizers, whom they said were the concerned citizen's response to out-of-touch politicians, and 'let's not let people like her into the White House.' Effective.

Measurement was a huge part of the workflow which demanded experiments on copy, subjects, graphics and the like.