How Barack Obama Won with Social Networking

The folks at XPLANE have created another awesome diagram (aka XPLANATION) to explain and demonstrate how the world works. This time it's about politics and social networking. Thanks to Parker Lee, vp marketing and business development at XPLANE, for agreeing to allow us to share this with you.

The Barack Obama presidential campaign team leveraged the power of social networking technologies, especially Facebook, to win the primary election this year. On a related note, I happened to catch a C-SPAN segment recently which broadcast a panel discussion involving several of the candidates' electronic communications directors. Hillary's staffer said [essentially], "When Obama had 1,000,000 million registered Facebook group members, we knew they had us beat."

Obama raised $55 million in campaign contributions in February of 2008 without attended a single fundraising event. Amazing! All of the panel participants agreed that social networking technology has forever changed the way campaign communications, organizing and fundraising will be conducted. Wow!

The XPLANE diagram (see link below) shows, in a simple, effective, concise visual illustration how they did it. The following quote is from XPLANE:

Barack Obama is the first major candidate to decline participation in the
public financing system for presidential campaigns. He’s found a more effective
way to raise money — by leveraging the power of the American people through
online Social Networks.

Download the PDF here. A picture is worth 1,000 words! Check it out.

[The infographic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Created by XPLANE - The Visual Thinking Company - www.xplane.com]