• Wired, Wednesday, November 5, 2008 11:02 AM

Few would dispute that Barack Obama ran a brilliant campaign to become the 44th President of the United States. A huge part of that strategy revolved around galvanizing his supporter base through the Internet. As Wired's writer Sarah Lai Stirland says, "Obama's online success dwarfed his opponent's, and proved key to his winning the presidency."

By the end of his campaign, Obama raised a record-breaking $600 million from more than 3 million people. Many donated through the Web. A social networking site called myBarackObama.com, which allowed people to create groups around social and geographical affinities, registered some 1.5 million users. Former Facebook executive Chris Hughes built it. Obama's all-star online team also included Joe Raspars, a veteran of Howard Dean's groundbreaking 2004 campaign. According to Stirland, the Obama campaign transformed the Internet "from being the medium of a core group of political junkies to a gateway for millions of ordinary Americans to participate in the political process, donating odd amounts of their spare time to their candidate through online campaign tools."

As Simon Rosenberg, a veteran of Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign, says, "He's run a campaign where he's used very modern tools, spoke to a new coalition, talked about new issues, and along the way, he's reinvented the way campaigns are run...Compared to our 1992 campaign, this is like a multi-national corporation versus a non-profit."

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