Intelligent use of the social media was central to the success of Barack Obama’s bid for the US presidency, according to Martin Thomas and David Brain, the authors of Crowd Surfing.

“When he was going for the democratic nomination he was the underdog, he didn’t have a huge budget and he relied very heavily on social media to mobilise people,” said Thomas, today a consultant, and formerly head of global communications planning at Mediaedge:cia. “And he truly did mobilise people, people who had never voted before. It was a movement. I saw people on TV last night who had hitch-hiked to Chicago to be there for his acceptance speech. He managed to create a movement that I don’t think could have been created by conventional media – you just wouldn’t get that kind of involvement or engagement.”

Brain, European CEO of Edelman, points to Obama’s early fundraising success online. “I think he got an amazing legitimisation from the way he raised funds – millions of people paying $5, $10 or $20. A million people putting in $20 carried a lot more legitimacy than 20 people putting up a million dollars.

“That said, it is interesting to see what he did with that money later on,” concedes Brain, referring to the millions spent on TV advertising in the latter days of the campaign.

“Once the stakes were raised and he was then fighting for the presidency, and the money started coming in, the balance shifted,” Thomas adds. “So they kept doing the social media stuff, but he became more dependent on traditional media. At that stage he had mobilised people. It was more a case of keeping the movement going rather than starting from scratch with TV.”

The key to Obama’s successful leverage of social media and online can be attributed in part to those with whom he associated. “He surrounded himself with the best social media guys available, so he got the best advice when it came to understanding how you embrace this media,” says Thomas.

Throughout the world, politicians are trying to get themselves involved in this form of communication, he continues. “You’ll see in the UK, David Cameron is trying to embrace these things. I think most politicians have kind of half got it. They think ‘what a great way to reach people’, but they have perhaps not quite realised it’s a two-way process, so they are still using it in quite a traditional way. They’re maybe not recognising it’s a whole different set of behaviours.”

Lessons from Obama’s campaign
Brain says there are lessons for commercial brands too that can be learnt from Obama’s use of new media. He points to the likes of the Black Eyed Peas’ Yes We Can video which spread virally like wildfire across the internet and was watched literally hundreds of millions of times.

“That video by the Black Eyed Peas was, allegedly, just done quickly by a bunch of stars in a hotel room, and was not connected to the campaign – I’m not sure if I quite believe that – but allegedly it was a bottom-up kind of production.

“Forrester recently did research that showed that 80pc of the comments on the top 50 brands around the world online are not by those brands themselves. Today people take brands and they begin to use them in their everyday life. Now, I don’t think any of us can claim to have the personality or charisma to create the level of engagement in our brands and our companies as an Obama, but I think there are lessons that can be learnt from what he did.

“The amount of consumer-generated content created throughout the primaries and the presidential campaign was enormous. That doesn’t just happen by accident,” he continues. “If you look at the Obama site (www.obama.com), one of the most amazing things for me is the way in which they provided all the tools that made it easy for people to get engaged in the election campaign. You can do that with your brand, albeit you’ll be more commercial about it. Just look at the way the site interfaced with Facebook, MySpace and Twitter – the microblogging site that’s red hot at the moment in terms of being cool.

“But I think one of the things that changed that campaign was the way he got two million people during the campaign to use scripts and phone numbers they got off that site to cold call two million other Americans and tell them to get out and vote for Obama. Some of the tactics and techniques they used, if you go and look at the site even now, make it the best site for harnessing the power of the consumer I’ve ever seen.”

Such success won’t have escaped the politicos of the world. Watch out for election campaigns in coming years that mimic the methods of team Obama.