Obama's Wide Web

With less than three months to go before the election, Triple O -- Obama's online operation -- is the envy of strategists in both parties, redefining the role that an online team can play within a campaign. If Triple O had a motto, it would be: "Meet the voters where they're at." Forget CNN, Fox News, NBC et al Sen Barack Obama stars on his own channel, and it's headed by Kate Albright-Hanna, a self-described YouTube addict who runs Obama's video team. Eyes rolled when Scott Goodstein rolled out the campaign's text-messaging program in June 2007. But texting is playing a crucial role in the campaign's obsession with growing its database. Throughout last year, Goodstein sent at least a dozen texts to collect names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Most important, the message came with "an ask," meaning users were asked to do something upon receiving it. Sen Obama was the first candidate to have profiles on AsianAve.com, MiGente.com and BlackPlanet.com, social networking sites (a.k.a. socnets) targeting the Asian, Latino and black communities. It's difficult to measure the value of these socnets in persuading voters to choose Obama. What's clear, however, is that online networking -- how supporters communicate with one another within their online communities -- has its advantages. All roads lead to BarackObama.com. In May, weeks before the end of the Democratic primary season, the site attracted 2.3 million unique visitors, according to the research company Nielsen Online. The latest figures from Hitwise.com, which regularly compares online traffic for BarackObama.com and JohnMcCain.com, says that Obama's site draws 72 percent of the total traffic to the two sites. Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum, an online hub of how politics and technology intersect, said: "Obama's success online is as much about how our society has changed, how our media ecology has changed, just in the past four years."