Barack Obama made you a mix tape

The race for President is over and the old man and the gun-toting crazy lady missed the boat*. The prospect of an African-American being the Commander in Chief would have seemed highly unlikely even just five years ago.

So how did Barack Obama and his team of campaign strategists go about making history?

Arguably one of the most important tools in his campaign armoury was the internet. Although McCain was the first to realise the importance of online during the 1999 primaries, running banner ads across influential sites, the Obama camp were the ones who implemented it to its full potential.

Through driving traffic to the website barackobama.com they managed to tally up an impressive $600m in funding by obtaining lots of small regular donations. This provided the Democrats with an enormous off and online marketing budget.

As well as paid-for methods of communication, there was a massive social media campaign, which utilised Facebook applications and groups, YouTube videos, blogs and viral email marketing in order to raise awareness for the presidential campaign.

The Democrats online marketing efforts dwarfed that of the Republicans, because they realised the importance of the internet, social media in particular, as a strategic marketing tool.

Rather than getting the people to go to them, they went to the people. By exploiting the tools that we have at our disposal in the modern world to their fullest, they reaped the rewards.

Here are our 3 favorite Obama 08 online efforts:

• Imagine a world where Palin was President
• If Obama hadn’t got in –would it have been your fault?
• Barack Obama wrote on your Funwall.

 * Editor's note: Tom's views are his own and in no way reflect the general views of Qube Media, except for the fact they do.