The year 2008 witnessed a different kind of war in The US. There was a change in the air when an African American made an entry to The White House for the 1st time. Barack Hussein Obama, a man with amazing personal charisma, influential public speaking skills & an unruffled demeanor created history by beating his opponent Senator John McCain in the Presidential race.

Both the US Presidential election candidates, Senator Barack Obama & Senator John McCain gave each other cut throat competition in all aspects. The election strategies were many & among them was the attempt to influence voters through Internet campaigns. This time, candidates used text messages, videogames, satellite broadcasting & a highly contagious amount of viral videos to broadcast their message, interact with people & raise funds.

Obama chose an excellent marketing & campaign team & his instinct for marketing took him to great heights. On one hand, McCain’s emphasis was on tried & tested TV advertisements & print campaigns, whereas Obama on the other made use of novel marketing tactics such as connecting to the public online to get contributions through his website. Since the beginning, Obama’s campaign relied on fundraising through online donations. Obama’s campaign broke records for most money raised in a day. The campaign reports that it received an average contribution of $86 per donor from 3.1 million people—online.

The McCain campaign also leveraged online marketing & raised plenty of money online but it was not as thorough & impressive as Obama’s, who successfully leveraged the might of online tactics & communicated with his supporters in new & direct ways such as mass texting. Based on compete data Obama’s site received 5.5 million unique visitors, while John McCain’s site received 3.1 million visitors. With the usage of logos, slogans, comprehensive fonts & promotional ideas on the web, Obama marketed himself like a high end consumer.

To be in touch with the voters, Obama transformed his role from a candidate to a perfect socialite. He gained high traffic on every social networking site on the internet including MySpace, Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube & Asian Ave. Not to mention, he had over 965, 163 fans on Facebook, compared to McCain’s unimpressive 583, 201.

Obama updated his website, blogs & even video games to engage not just donors & volunteers but all citizens. From the imaginative campaign logo to the thirty minute informative commercial, Obama’s communications were proficient & result oriented. His blog captivated the public more when compared with McCain. It is reported that Obama’s blog had 20 posts in a single day, after the last debate.

The campaign made its mark in both paid & organic search strategies, for every search for McCain there were 2.2 searches for Obama.

The video sharing website was also not spared by both the candidates & Obama’s strategies succeeded here as well. Obama’s YouTube channel has 100,000 subscribers & his videos have been viewed 17.1 million times while John McCain’s YouTube channel has only 24,000 subscribers & has been viewed just 11.1 million times. The video “I Got a Crush…On Obama” was an instant online hit, rebroadcast all over television, written about in newspapers & currently features on YouTube with over 10 million views.

Obama’s campaign was significant in teaching all online marketers the value of creating opportunities for consumers to interact with their brand as much as possible. The mantra was “more the brand interaction, better the brand loyalty” which was focused through various other online marketing strategies. “Obama everywhere”, “Barack TV”, “Obama store” & “Obama Mobile” are some of the features that drew zillions on Obama’s website.

A hope seller & a savior; Obama packaged himself as a product very well. A brand with the motto “change you can believe in” successfully narrated the power of internet marketing through his great victory.