After President Barack Obama launched his 2012 earlier this year his campaign sent emails, tweets and Facebook messaging, including Facebook ads to ask nearly 13 million followers supporters from his 2008 campaign contact list to declare on Facebook "I'm In!" for Obama's 2012 re-election campaign.
Emails to supporters seek small-dollar donations in exchange for campaign coffee mugs or a chance to win dinner with the president. The campaign's website helps supporters find local events, plan meetings and raise money while its digital team develops the next big thing.
If Obama broke new ground in 2008 using email, text messages and the Web to reach voters, Obama version 2.0 campaign strategy plans to take the new media Web campaign to the next level – by taking advantage of the expansive roles that the Internet and social media are playing in voters' lives.
"The successful [2012] campaign is going to be one that integrates all the various elements of the digital channel – email, text, website, mobile apps, and social networks – together as one digital program and also mixing the digital program together with the offline reality of field organizations," said Joe Rospars, the Obama campaign's chief digital strategist.
"In the end," Rospars said, "all the digital stuff is in service of the offline organizing to ultimately persuading voters and turning them out."
Obama took advantage of a strong Internet campaign in 2008 to raise an estimated $500 million online while regularly communicating with supporters through text messages, an email list estimated at more than 13 million and content on his 2008 My Barack Obama campaign website:
When Obama was close to announcing his vice presidential selection of Joe Biden in August 2008, the campaign encouraged supporters to find out by text message, a move that prompted more than 2 million people to voluntarily give their cell phone number to the Obama campaign.
Three years later, social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter have exploded, smart phones and apps are more prevalent, tablet computers are on the rise, and most Americans are online. When Obama announced his presidential campaign in 2007, Facebook had fewer than 20 million users worldwide. That number has now surpassed 500 million.
"There's no online and offline organizing. There's organizing," said Jeremy Bird, Obama's national field director, during a session at Netroots Nation in Minneapolis.