Paradigm Shift

Patrick Ruffini offers a similar message that you have heard here, that there is a fundamental shift in the manner with which political campaigning is conducted.

All of this — the massive resource advantage Obama now enjoys — is the result of a decision to trust in a fundamentally more deeper and more resilient medium for building support for his campaign: a word of mouth network that can only be corralled online. Hillary Clinton trusted the establishment and is on the brink of losing. The GOP candidates who leaned on the party’s Wise Old Men lost.

We saw the first concrete results of adaptation in 2004 with Dean's prowess in online fundraising. Adapting to, rather than fighting the new paradigm of political campaigning with the social web has enabled Obama to out-raise everyone. More importantly, he has taken the opportunity a step further, out-mobilizing everyone through the use of technology to boot.

The political web is now reaching the vast majority of the primary electorate with dozens of touchpoints throughout the cycle — few of them controlled by the campaigns themselves — and is reaching all the people who will do anything beyond vote in a general election.

The impact goes beyond just politics. A new channel for communication is maturing, with a power to persuade unlike any other. And, the right message radiates with an ease never before seen. The social web exponentially changes the balance between effort in and effort out. The message has even more paramount than ever.

The ramifications of the success of political web strategy this cycle will be felt for years to come outside this space. There are certainly areas where politics follows distantly behind traditional marketing. Even some of the techniques finally being employed with much success this cycle have been around for years. However, there are few events as public and as closely watched as the US presidential election. Just as the message radiates, so too will the methods...