• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, August 23, 2012

Hey, I didn’t phrase it that way. It came from Thomas Gensemer, Co-Founder, Managing Partner of Obama campaign digital shop WPP's Blue State Digital, and the opening keynote of the Social Media Insider Summit at Lake Tahoe this morning.

The secret, Gensemer said, was a grassroots organizing strategy that began with Howard Dean becoming chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 2005.

“It was about recognition that a neighbor knocking on a neighbor’s door was more important than a television spot,” he explained.

That grassroots mobilizing extended digitally via a wide range of platforms, including the Web, but especially email. Gensemer disclosed that the Obama campaign currently has an email subscriber list of 15 million people, and has raised $1 billion to date – about 65% of the dollars coming into the campaign.