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He is American attorney and politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American to be elected to the presidency in 2008 and he won a second term in 2012. He previously served as a U.S. senator from Illinoisfrom 2005 to 2008 and an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004.
Who was Barack Obama?
Obama was born on August 4, 1961at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, Hawaii.He is the only president who was born outside of the contiguous 48 states. He graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review. After serving on the Illinois State Senate, he was elected a U.S. senator representing Illinois in 2004. He and wife Michelle Obama have two daughters, Malia and Sasha. Barack.
Obama Family
Obama’s father, Barack Obama Sr., was born of Luo ethnicity in Nyanza Province, Kenya. Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, was born on an Army base in Wichita, Kansas, during World War II.Obama’s parents met in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was a foreign student on a scholarship.[13][14] The couple married in Wailuku, Hawaii, on February 2, 1961, six months before Obama was born.While living with his grandparents, Obama enrolled in the esteemed Punahou Academy. He excelled in basketball and graduated with academic honors in 1979.
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As one of only three black students at the school, he became conscious of racism and what it meant to be African-American. Obama later described how he struggled to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage with his own sense of self: ‘I noticed that there was nobody like me in the Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalog . . . and that Santa was a white man,’ he wrote. ‘I went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror with all my senses and limbs seemingly intact, looking as I had always looked, and wondered if something was wrong with me.’
Barack Obama’s Education
Obama entered Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1979. After two years, he transferred to Columbia University in New York City, graduating in 1983 with a degree in political science. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law in 1991.After graduating from Columbia University as an undergrad, Obama worked in the business sector for two years. He moved to Chicago in 1985, where he worked on the impoverished South Side as a community organizer for low-income residents in the Roseland and the Altgeld Gardens communities.It was during this time that Obama, who said he ‘was not raised in a religious household,’ joined the Trinity United Church of Christ.
Obama entered Harvard Law School in 1988. The next year, he met with constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe. Their discussion so impressed Tribe, that when Obama asked to join his team as a research assistant, the professor agreed.“The better he did at Harvard Law School and the more he impressed people, the more obvious it became that he could have had anything,“ said Professor Tribe in a 2012 interview with Frontline, “but it was clear that he wanted to make a difference to people, to communities.”In 1989, Obama joined the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin as a summer associate, where he met his future wife Michelle. In February 1990, Obama was elected the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review.
U.S Presidential Campaign Planning & Execution
The Obama campaign pulled off what experts are calling perhaps the most successful and innovative integrated marketing communication campaign ever attempted on a mass scale. Backed by great messaging and with near surgical precision, the Obama campaign successfully leveraged every major outlet and platform to spread its message and get voters involved. This included everything from sophisticated campaign Web sites and email marketing to file-sharing sites and social networks. The end results were spectacular: more than 13 million email addresses, hundreds of millions of dollars raised, and a historic election victory.
Web Marketing
Obama team spent nearly about $ 26.4 million on web marketing. Here are the campaign that were planned and executed.
BarackObama.com
The campaign’s main Web site was established at BarackObama.com, with related sites for each state (e.g., ca.barackobama.com for California and ny.barackobama.com for New York), and a community portal at My.BarackObama.com. Customized Spanish-language and closed-caption sites were also created. Content for each site aimed to build a connection between voters and Barack Obama, Michelle Obama and Joe and Jill Biden, with biographical information and a regularly updated blog that helped make them personable and relatable.
Users could also access speech transcripts, press releases, and facts pertaining to assertions made on both sides. The sites were designed to serve as a comprehensive resource for helping users become active campaigners. They clearly urged users to find local events, contact undecided voters, and share their individual stories. A quote from Obama in the header of each page gave users a personal message: “I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington … I’m asking you to believe in yours.”
A supporter on My.BarackObama.com could create a personal webpage in order to host events (that were then searchable), send invitations to other supporters, upload photos, keep a personal blog, and access data bases of phone numbers for doing phone banking from his or her own living room,” Hartman explained.
Additional tools were offered to assist users in establishing their own communities, campaign sites, and promotions elsewhere. For example, there were downloadable logos, taglines, site badges and widgets, chat buddy icons, posters, signs, and flyers. Videos and documents, such as Obama’s “Blueprint for Change,” could be easily emailed to friends, downloaded, linked to, or embedded with available code.
Neighbor to Neighbor
Later, a “Neighbor to Neighbor” feature was added to provide users with lists of residents on their own blocks whom the campaign wished to contact, thus enabling the campaign to reach these voters through personal contact with someone already possessing a community bond.My.BarackObama.com offered a database of guidelines and how-to’s—how to plan a voter registration drive, how to host a debate party, how to knock on doors, how to make phone calls for Obama.
Email Marketing
Geer and his team sent literally billions of email communications over the course of the campaign and wound up with an astonishing 13 million email addresses by Election Day. On any given day, the campaign would send out more than 100 different email versions, segmented by demographics, geography, fundraising history, and dozens of other key attributes. Geer attributes his success to building the list early, detailed segmentation, and the use of split testing. His staff relentlessly tested each element of every major email push, from subject line to creative to copy. Another important factor is something many marketers know about but often miss: having a very clear and distinct call to action in every email. Whether it was donating $5, sharing a video, or signing up to volunteer, each email was carefully tailored to get a response
Messaging
During the campaign, Geer worked with Obama Campaign Manager David Plouffe to deliver frank assessments of important campaign events, such as primary results, debate outcomes and major poll announcements. These short emails, which later included videos, cut through the typical spin of most campaigns to give a real sense of what was going on in the campaign. Geer believes the emails were key in building true relationships with supporters. Obama also used email to quickly pivot and respond to campaign issues. For example, when Sarah Palin seemed to mock Obama’s experience as a community organizer in her acceptance speech as vice president, Obama’s campaign pounced. They sent out an email essentially asserting that Palin not only attacked Obama, but attacked supporters who felt they owned a piece of the campaign. The result of the email and the tactic: $11 million raised, the largest single day of fund-raising in American politics.
Social Networking
In his Nov. 9, 2008 New York Times article, David Carr describes how Obama solicited the advice of Netscape founder and Facebook board member Marc Andreessen in Feb. 2007 about how he could incorporate the growing phenomenon of social networking into his campaign.One of the first was Yahoo Answers, which Obama used to directly respond to public inquiries. Others included the following.
MySpace Fifty-seven MySpace profiles were set up to include not only Barack Obama’s main profile (which garnered more than one million friends, compared with McCain’s 200,000+), but also one for each state (e.g., “Oregon for Obama”) and various special-interest groups, including Women for Obama (12,100+ friends), Students for Obama (10,000+ friends), Obama Pride (7,600+ friends), African Americans for Obama (4,600+ friends), and many more.
Along with Barack and Michelle Obama profile pages that were updated daily, the campaign established numerous groups on Facebook for every state and special interest group, just as it did on MySpace. In addition, groups were established for Michelle Obama (228,750 supporters), Joe Biden (180,200+ supporters), and the “Obama Action Wire” (52,700+ supporters). The Facebook groups tended to be larger than those of MySpace. The main Barack Obama group generated more than three million supporters. For example, the “Students for Barack Obama” group had 225,400+ members; “Women for Obama,” 77,000+ members; “Obama Pride,” 23,200+ members; “First Americans for Obama,” 2,200+ members; “Latinos for Obama,” 10,000+ members; and “African Americans for Obama,” 10,600+ members. Sharable photos, videos, and notes (similar to a small blog post) were available on every page, along with events for which supporters could RSVP. Any new posts were automatically announced to all group supporters. “Obama could post messages on Facebook groups that would instantly reach over a million supporters, fans who would then email the news to other friends.
Facebook users also created groups against McCain and Palin, such as, “I Have More Foreign Policy Experience Than Sarah Palin” (251,410 members) and “1,000,000 Strong Against Sarah Palin” (209,673 members). They were also wildly popular and passed from friend to friend.
The campaign also aimed to connect with business professionals by using LinkedIn’s groups and answer section. There, campaign staff and supporters could answer specific questions and respond to related discussions initiated by the site’s users. “Because the LinkedIn network includes a lot of small-business experts, it was a great place to get feedback on the campaign and the campaign’s proposals,” Goodstein said. Specialty Social Networks The Obama for America campaign also reached out to distinct demographics through networking sites that specifically serve those groups, such as BlackPlanet.com, AsianAve.com, MiGente.com, Eons.com (for babyboomers), Disaboom.com (for Americans with disabilities), and Faithbase.com. Another specialty site leveraged by the campaign to inform users of current and upcoming campaign events was Eventful.com. It offers users the ability to search for events within a given radius distance.
Ensuring consistent information
Campaign staff and volunteers made sure that the information posted was up to date and accurate on all platforms. Also, user messages and questions were answered in a timely fashion, and answers were in line with campaign messaging, and in the format received (e.g., with an email if the request came through LinkedIn’s email capability). Tying it all together: The campaign also used cross-promotions to make users of one channel aware of the other resources. For example, Facebook pages contained links to all other campaign Facebook pages, as well as the Obama YouTube channel and Obama’s main MySpace profile page. MySpace profiles promoted BarackObama.com and Obama Mobile, and invited users to follow Obama on Twitter. Plus, it offered links to the campaign’s YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Flickr accounts. The main blog on My.BarackObama.com was used to mention and link readers to alternate campaign channels, such as Twitter.
Online-File sharing site
YouTube The campaign established an Obama YouTube channel and added just shy of 1,800 videos during the campaign (although more have been added since), compared with McCain’s 329. The channel attracted 114,500+ subscribers, compared to 28,400 for McCain, and some 18.4 million channel views.
The official Obama channel was consistently ranked one of the most viewed channels on YouTube, and thousands of supporters created millions of unaffiliated user videos that still circulate today. The Web site listed on the channel also linked users to a page on BarackObama.com that included a video message from Obama. In it, he welcomed users to the official campaign Web site and encouraged them to get involved. Plus, it had a form for receiving campaign communications.
Message frequency was an important consideration in the texting campaign because users typically must pay a fee to send and receive messages. The campaign therefore did not want to send too many messages, which might annoy supporters and lead them to opt out. It was also careful to maximize the information included in each message. At the same time, the campaign was conscious of not under-messaging and missing the opportunity to keep supporters energized through to the end. Users therefore received five to 20 messages a month, “depending on the depth of their involvement and the stage of the campaign,” according to Distributive Networks.
Another key aspect that differentiated Obama Mobile from other campaign elements was the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) stipulation that prohibits marketers from making first contact or sending messages without an explicit “opt in” from the end user. To the campaign’s advantage, this meant that those who did opt-in were consciously choosing to participate and were therefore more likely to remain active in the campaign. However, it also meant that the database had to be built from the ground up.
Integrated Marketing
The dedicated short code and its related keywords were featured on everything from yard signs to social media profiles to radio and television commercials (including the campaign’s 2008 Super Bowl ad). “If someone was listening to the radio or saw a billboard, the URL was always on there, but [the campaign] would then have to count on supporters going home, logging in and signing up,” explained Bertram. “That was the nice thing about text. It was a great call to action in places where supporters didn’t have immediate access [to the Internet].”
Live promotions and endorsements
The campaign took advantage of its captive audience’s excitement at rallies and events to explicitly ask attendees to text in. It also used celebrity endorsements, such as the time Oprah took.
