This post has been guest authored by Sudhindra Rao,a Digital Communications Professional who’s also an ardent Social Media freak.He blogs here and tweets here.Click here to know more about him.

Barack Obama has been elected as the 44th President of the United States of America.Look anywhere and you will find a lot of speculations,observations,analysis and debates over his elections campaign,as to how President Obama succeeded,how he used the communications tool called “Online media” effectively to bring in the change.

Barack Obama overcame enormous political obstacles to win.Obama and his organization were extremely disciplined & skilled in delivering Obama’s message across various platforms.

He planned for success rather than anticipating failure.He understood and embraced the power of a digital campaigning and assumed the posture of an activist.By doing so, he created a nation of activists, a true grassroot movement, for his campaign and his beliefs.

A look at the digital steps related to his campaign

In Barack Obama’s headquarters, young staff members continuously monitored, analyzed online voter data and targeted potential backers. They zipped one e-mail to an undecided voter and zapped a different message to a firm supporter.

Depending on the voter, they followed with Facebook reminders, telephone calls, text messages and, most important, house visits.

As some campaign workers built mailing lists and telephone trees according to political, professional and personal interests, others created the first groups and profiles on sites targetting youngsters to professionals to Senior citizens.

They also used BlackPlanet.com, MiGente.com, AsianAve.com and GLEE.com – the MySpace and Facebook equivalent for, respectively, the African American, Latino, Asian and gay online communities. They have posted more than 350 videos on his YouTube channel, twice as many as Clinton, and his videos have been viewed nearly twice as often as hers. Obama has more MySpace friends than any other Democratic candidate, and he lists more Facebook supporters than all other Democrats combined.

His activist campaign attracted unprecedented involvement of people online by creating personalized experiences for supporters, allowing them to raise money, meet like-minded neighbors, use phone calls to interact, and get e-mails and SMS updates and calls to action. Anyone who disputes the idea that his was a true, online grassroots campaign, the first in American history, needs only to consider this statistic. JFK had 21,000 campaign donors; President Obama had 2.3 million.

Some Figures:

Web presence (Google):
Obama = 82,600,000 results
McCain = 63,000,000
George W. Bush = 42,000,000
JFK = 14,000,000

Facebook “friends”
Obama = 2,155,244
McCain = 578,651
George W. Bush = 0

YouTube Channel subscribers
Obama = 101,649
McCain = 25,439

Twitter Facts:
Obama : Following: 123,547, Followers: 119,539
McCain: Following: 5,239, Followers: 4,917

The Obama campaign boasts that more than 350,000 people have created personal accounts on My.BarackObama.com, 25,000+ have created blogs on the site; more than 20,000 have created their own personal fundraising pages with their own goals, thermometers to track progress, and follow-up tools; more than 20,000 offline local events have been planned using related tools on the site; and more than 6,500 active grassroots volunteer groups have formed in support of Obama with more than 200,000 members.

And all of that translated into an enormous victory Tuesday.

With this election alone and before any other decisions or actions, America has sent a very powerful message to the world and is changing its image dramatically.

Best wishes for this new era in America, this new era for the world.

Change can Happen!!!

(Inputs from various online Articles, News & Blogs)

If you liked it,why not subscribe for all future posts ! Subscribe here