Election 2008 and Online

Two really interesting and perhaps game changing trends emerged in this election: the way we used online to follow and participate in this election and the way Barack Obama used the online channel.

Ariana Huffington of the Huffington Post declared, a few days ago, the Internet the winner of the vote . She’s right. I’m finally weaning myself from my addiction to dailykos.com, realclearpolitics.com and others. What’s really interesting, though, are the novel ways everyone was using the Web, from Twitter alerts of voting irregularities to PBS sending out digital video cameras to people to document the vote on YouTube on the Video Your Vote Channel . I was able to even pretend I was John King of CNN last night, digging into county voting in Indiana in real time.

Amazing. It was truly amazing.

But, not the most amazing.

There are a lot of articles about Obama and his use of the online media. He took what Howard Dean started and elevated it 100-fold. Yes he was great at raising money and communicating and the ring tones, and, all of it.

But the most astounding thing they did, in my opinion, was to set up ways to connect with voters through the Web. I spent the last weekend calling voters in Ohio, New Hampshire and Colorado. I did this despite the fact that I never spoke to an Obama rep nor did I ever visit Obama headquarters. What they did was make my house an ersatz headquarters.

And it was all online. I signed up at my.barackobama.com, I chose my state, I got my calling list, I received a script, and I registered the results of the calls in real time. What an incredibly efficient operation. The Obama campaign was then able to track everything through Web analytics and have clear, actionable intelligence.

Whew! Think if businesses could do this. The Obama campaign showed what this channel could do. And everyone else experimented and won. We won.

And for those who think TV is going away, think again. It was rather the combination of the old media outlets and the new that made this election so great.

User Generated Journalism

CNN has started an interesting project called iReport. They’re looking to augment their professional journalism with citizen journalism. It’s a little different from the normal “send us in your pictures of disasters.” It also looks like the first big push from a major news outlet since the failed LA Times attempt a couple of years ago.

From a UGC and a Web 2.0 prospective, iReport has some great benefits for CNN.

It adds to their core offering – By opening this up to a wide range of people, CNN potentially has much more material to show its viewers, both online and offline.

It gives them a huge feedback group – Even if they don’t use the material, they can tap into the content generators and have them react (a big deal for TV). They did this, for example, after the debates.

It teaches people about journalism – Not only is this a great public service (check out their advice on how to create a story) that educates the public, it makes content generators more appreciative of how hard it is to create good stories.

Now, take those three things, and see if you can apply them to your company or client. If you can do that through customer participation, you should win. I hope CNN does, it’s a great idea.

I only wonder how much this costs them to do.  You can surely measure the monetary impact of participation, but it still would be fun to get an ROI check on this.