Obama moves White House into digital era

Friday, December 26, 2008

Tech-savvy campaign teaches officials how to effectively use Internet to reach a wider audience.
David Ho / Cox News Service

Presidential addresses on YouTube. Online chats with administration officials. And millions of energized Barack Obama backers ready for the next e-mail or text message calling them to action.

It's been called White House 2.0, the first truly digital presidency. If the nascent effort succeeds, government and politics may never be the same.

Building on the president-elect's pioneering, tech-savvy campaign, his team aims to connect the incoming administration directly with citizens through Web sites, blogs and online social networks.

For Obama, the effort also promises to give him powerful new tools that can rally public support for his agenda while bypassing traditional media.

On change.gov, the Obama transition Web site, a new discussion feature invited people to form online communities that provide "instant feedback" about Obama's top issues, starting with health care.

Looking ahead to a wired White House, "our first priority is making sure that we keep the millions of people who played an integral role in the campaign engaged in the process," Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki said. "We also recognize now that we have a much larger audience to include: people who didn't vote or didn't vote for us."

Obama's 21-month campaign was an Internet powerhouse, raising more than $500 million from 3 million online donors, his team says. Those donations, the vast majority of them in increments of $100 or less, accounted for the bulk of the more than $750 million his campaign raised.

The online organizing of supporters and volunteers also had unmatched scale. The campaign's e-mail list contains about 13 million addresses. Another 1 million people signed up to receive campaign text messages, such as those that announced Joe Biden as the vice presidential pick and mobilized supporters on Election Day.

The campaign's social network, MyBarackObama.com, or MyBO, includes 2 million profiles and about 400,000 blog posts. About 5 million supporters signed up on other social networks, with more than 3 million on Facebook.

"The lesson every elected official should take away from the Obama campaign's use of social media is that the Internet has now flipped the entire campaign process around and put individual voters truly in charge of the information they receive," said Republican Congressman John Culberson of Houston, who uses online networking tools such as Twitter.

While Obama's team is working to bring its online experience to governing, restrictions prohibit the White House from using the campaign e-mail list. The list's future use, possibly through the Democratic National Committee or a re-election organization, is still being decided.