Barack Obama is a movement that changed the world. Much like Reagan made direct mail integral to modern campaign marketing and Kennedy took TV by storm, Barack Obama has literally changed the way technology will be used in every election (and marketing campaign) in the future.

Barack Obama is my hero. OK, more specifically, his team is my hero. Take a look at this great video on CBC’s website with Rahaf Harfoush, talking about what it’s like to work on the Obama campaign. There’s also a great article this morning on the CBC’s main website, sort of a Q&A about social media strategy and how the big O used readily available technology to shift the playing field from Republican dominated TV to the vast wasteland of the Internet. 

So, whatever the next four (or eight) years brings us, looking at how the Obama campaign shifted the playing field from large donations to nearly $200 million in smaller, grass roots donations is a key lesson for all Internet marketers.

First, Obama’s team ensured that they owned their proper domain names for their candidate and they protected their brand. A few years ago, Belinda Stronach ran for leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada. She’s rich, she’s powerful, she’s young, she’s attractive and if you believed her Internet presence, she’s into kinky sex fantasy fiction … oh wait, that was  belinda.com, not her official website belinda.ca … oops. People are funny, you tell them to go to a website and they’re going to go to the .com first … it’s the default, so if you’re going to protect your brand go for the .com first and then buy up all the others later.

After ensuring their brand was set, the Obama campaign used tried-and-tested methods of real world marketing genius to connect with their people, t-shirts. The only thing we love more than America? Free t-shirts. Look, I don’t get it but it appears to work. Actually, the reason it works is because it makes the marketing campaign about you, the participant not the company. The Obama campaign took it a few steps further, transforming their online presence from a technical resource to a personal community. Take a look at their community. It’s not a forum, it’s not a blog, it’s my. Back with I helped build the US Beer Drinking Team, I came up with a concept called Me Marketing and proposed to the concept to their parent company. The Obama campaign brilliantly called their community … my.barackobama.com … not only did this ensure their server load was balanced (*cough geek*) but also turned a bland social networking resource into something which belonged to the people he was trying to reach.

The footer of Obama's website continues the message.

Jakob Neilson wrote a column years ago about Ten Usability Heuristics, I live and die by these ten rules and maybe without even knowing it, so do the people over at the Obama campaign. Neilson uses some pretty fancy speak but one of the basic rules he comes up with is what happens in the digital world should reflect the real world. All too often a website is the product of techies and back room IT people, instead of the marketing team but in the case of the Obama campaign, the website is powered by hope and it’s an extension of the real world values his team communicates in other mediums. Robin Williams has a rule for this too. It’s the R in CRAP (repetition), which is a good thing.

There’s a lot more to how Obama took the White House than his teams use of fancy marketing or web technology, some claim it was a backlash to Bush while others will argue it was simply his time. Personally, I’m more interested in the technology than the man and how his team has reshaped the political and marketing future for all of us.