Exclusive : Barack 2.0: Social Media Lessons For Business

By Author: Talani
Total Articles: 4
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On January 20th, 2009 the world witnessed history with the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States. On the road to Pennsylvania Avenue, Team Obama created a new paradigm with the utilization of social media. A record $500 Million in revenue was generated exclusively online. Let me repeat...$500 Million in campaign revenue.

A few unique ways Obama's campaign targeted voters was thru Xbox advertising, creating iPhone applications and utilizing social networks.

While the world watched in amazement, an innovative group diligently collected valuable data to analyze this phenomena. For the past 18 months David Bullock, co-author of Barack 2.0: Social Media Lessons for Business, has shadowed Obama's online mastermind Chris Hughes' every move. If you don't know, Chris Hughes is the co-founder of FACEBOOK, which he sold for an astonishing $4.1 Billion. Hughes used his intimate knowledge of social media to create a Barack Obama omnipresence on the Internet. The strategy included: Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, FACEBOOK and LinkedIn, to name a few.

Obama was not the first candidate ...
... to use Internet grassroot efforts to mobilize online supporters (Dean '04). However, he was the first to convert

the online mania into votes. Per the story run by the Washington Post, this is a brief summary of the Obama Campaign's online operation stats:

- 3 million online donors

- 6.5 million online donations adding up to more than $500 million.

- More than 1 billion e-mails sent during the campaign

- 2 million profiles created on the My.BarackObama.com social network

The data collected in Barack 2.0: Social Media Lessons for Business has David Bullock in high demand by Harvard Business, Wall Street and

many high profile political campaigns. In fact, he was, recently recognized as one of the TOP 100 Online Marketers in the world. In addition, David Bullock has been a mentor, friend and a major stimulus for me to begin blogging.

Barack 2.0: Social Media Lessons for Business is the blueprint for a smart business online engagement model. I am pleased to offer a few EXCLUSIVE EXCERPTS: I added parenthesis ( ) for my comments.