FYI: The Secret to How Obama Financed his Campaign

earth mom

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Sat May-17-08 04:28 PM
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FYI: The Secret to How Obama Financed his Campaign

As per the article, Obama's campaign is much like a Silicon Valley Startup.

This is information that should NOT be swept under the carpet here on DU.

The Amazing Money Machine

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What ultimately transformed the presidential race�what swept Obama past his rivals to dizzying new levels of campaign wealth�was not the money that poured in from Silicon Valley but the technology and the ethos.

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To understand how Obama�s war chest has grown so rapidly, it helps to think of his Web site as an extension of the social-networking boom that has consumed Silicon Valley over the past few years. The purpose of social networking is to connect friends and share information, its animating idea being that people will do this more readily and comfortably when the information comes to them from a friend rather than from a newspaper or expert or similarly distant authority they don�t know and trust. The success of social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and, later, professional networking sites like LinkedIn all but ensured that someday the concept would find its way into campaigning. A precursor, Meetup.com, helped supporters of Howard Dean organize gatherings during the last Democratic primary season, but compared with today�s sites, it was a blunt instrument.

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When My.BarackObama.com launched, at the start of the campaign, its lineage was clear. The site is a social-networking hub centered on the candidate and designed to give users a practically unlimited array of ways to participate in the campaign. You can register to vote or start your own affinity group, with a listserv for your friends. You can download an Obama news widget to stay current, or another one (which Spinner found) that scrolls Obama�s biography, with pictures, in an endless loop. You can click a �Make Calls� button, receive a list of phone numbers, and spread the good news to voters across the country, right there in your home. You can get text-message updates on your mobile phone and choose from among 12 Obama-themed ring tones, so that each time Mom calls you will hear Barack Obama cry �Yes we can!� and be reminded that Mom should register to vote, too.

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The true killer app on My.BarackObama.com is the suite of fund-raising tools. You can, of course, click on a button and make a donation, or you can sign up for the subscription model, as thousands already have, and donate a little every month. You can set up your own page, establish your target number, pound your friends into submission with e-mails to pony up, and watch your personal fund-raising �thermometer� rise. �The idea,� Rospars says, �is to give them the tools and have them go out and do all this on their own.� The organizing principle behind Obama�s Web site, in other words, is the approach Mark Gorenberg used with such success�only scaled to such a degree that it has created an army of more than a million donors and raisers. The Clinton campaign belatedly sought to mimic Obama�s Internet success, and has raised what in any other context would be considered significant money online�but nothing like Obama�s totals, in dollars or donors. John McCain�s online fund-raising has been abysmal.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/obama-finance