SWOT Analysis Of Barack Obama's Social Media Campaign

Barack Obama made history on November 4, 2008 by becoming the first African American President of the United States of America.His social media campaign played a key role in his victory as hee gained a total of 5 million supporters on 15 different social networks like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace. The distinguishing feature of Obama’s social media campaign was that it focused on involving the people and used it to organize, fundraise more effectively and used it to support their bottoms-up grassroot campaign strategy which helped them connect with the people.

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The Websites:

The two main sites www.BarackObama.coma and www.MyBarackObama.com by Blue State Digital were launched with the announcement of Obama’s candidacy in February 2007.. The

SWOT Analysis

Strengths of Obama campaign:

• An effective team: The campaign built a high-effective team with excellent team leaders. For instance, Chris Hughes, one of the co-founders of Facebook, as director of internal organizing. The main attribution was to explore networking technologies such as Facebook, MySpace,YouTube so as to promote people sharing and connecting with each other. Another important team member is Sam Graham-Felsen who focused on how to tell the emotional and human stories of Obama’s supporters.

• Innovation of selection strategy: The campaign team used social media and technology as an integral part of their strategy. Therefore, they built a national grassroots movement to support Obama by more involvement and engagement.

• Authentic and powerful image building: Youtube, Facebook page and so on allowed people to realize how authentic Obama is. Besides, Obama focused on three key words: Hope,Change,Action to build good relationships with individual supporters. As a result, the team developed a groundswell of supporters who felt confident to Obama.

Weaknesses of Obama

In early 2007, Obama was just a little-know senator running for president against Democratic nominee and household name, Hilary Clinton and Republican candidate,John McCain. It is obviously that Obama lack of political capital and achievements compared with Hilary and McCain.

• Precious limited time devoted in politics. Both Hilary and McCain had been involved in president election campaign for many times and owned experienced of how to attract supporters and money.

Potential Opportunities:

• Access of Internet. Due to the large population of using Internet, people could find a variety of ways to involve and engage this campaign.

• Youth market. More and more young people pay more attention to selection and social media provides a way to connect this campaign more closely.

• Specific social target. Obtaining the questions from external social networks and then providing answers and responses to people which could target different social