Ted Mann's got a good post on what lessons news organizations can learn from the Obama campaign about using technology. The Obama campaign was very savvy about using e-mail, text messages and a very slick custom iPhone app to stay in touch with supporters and volunteers.
Mann doesn't mention this, but the campaign wasn't too shabby with Facebook, either, and the localization of its Web site was very sharp–especially the events calendar. Obama aggressively took advantage of YouTube, too, and supporters even got an election eve e-mail reminding them of the location of their polling place. Not sure how the campaign missed Twitter, but they covered just about all of the other hot technology bases.
Alan Mutter wrote back in August about how the Obama campaign's use of text-messaging to end-run the media on the announcement of Joe Biden as running mate was a landmark, and that's yet another indicator of how smart the Obama folks was about using technology.
Is your newsroom anywhere near as advanced? If not, you should be looking at all of the above. As the Obama people realized, the audience now expects to reached using a variety of media and technologies. If you're not aggressively pursuing text messaging, e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, widgets, video and iPhone apps (among others), you're falling even further behind. Simply having a Web site just doesn't cut it anymore.
Great post. But, the Obama campaign didn't miss Twitter:
http://twitter.com/BarackObama
(over 114,000 followers when I wrote this)
Posted by: Justin | November 04, 2008 at 11:14 AM
McCain also had a Twitter account, but used much less frequently. (And with fewer followers.)
Interesting the tone of McCain's tweets was quite hostile.
e.g. the tweet that leads to this post on his Web site: http://www.johnmccain.com/McCainReport/Read.aspx?guid=b93e2e37-d69f-46b3-8ad1-d5e58ae28541
Posted by: Rocky | November 05, 2008 at 06:04 AM