The BarackBerry – gadget for leading a connected world

Obama was determined to hang on to his lifeline to the real world outside the White House bubble: “They’re going to have to prise it out of my hands”, he said when told he might have to lose what had become a vital campaign tool. And so he’s the first President to bring even Web 1.0 into the White House with conviction. Neither Bill Clinton nor George W Bush used e-mail during their presidency.

The “BarackBerry” triumph caps what has been a truly integrated digital campaign to get Obama to Washington. Like any great digital campaign, Obama devised a brilliant strategy, and then merely used digital tools to implement it. The brilliance of the campaign involved using local networks for fund-raising, mobilising support and spreading campaign updates and policy summaries. A perfect example of how Web 2.0 works – not pushing a message from the centre, but establishing a network, allowing the network to elect or find its own nodes around which information gathers, and then using digital communications as the tool to open a dispersed dialogue.

The iPhone app which prioritised users’ contact books by key battleground states; the text message updates on campaign news; the micro-donation engine which enabled three million ordinary people to donate in a way never seen before; the use of Facebook and YouTube (more than 1,165 videos posted and 14.8 million views); advertising on online gaming (eg Xbox360) and on mobile. Individually, each of these were good uses of the internet in political campaigning, but not in themselves brilliant.

What was brilliant was the way that each was harnessed to make the campaign about individuals, to make the message of change their message of change. Like YouTube and Facebook themselves, this wasn’t a politician cannily using the web to tell people about himself, it was someone who understood that the web is about harnessing the power of the network.   What Obama did was start a million conversations about what change is needed in the USA. And that’s why it’s good to see him win the fight to keep his PDA, so that he can carry on with at least some of the conversations that brought him to the White House.