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OBAMA'S I.T. STRATEGY

By most accounts, Clinton started out with a more traditional campaign and kept a tighter rein on the user participation on her Web site. She entered the race with the most name recognition, political clout, and big-money backers. And yet she wound up seeing her initial financial advantage eclipsed by a Lilliputian horde of small donors, most of whom made their contributions over the Internet. Consider these statistics from a report of the non-partisan Campaign Finance Institute:

Obama has topped the $259 million President George W. Bush raised in that phase of his reelection campaign, which was the previous record.

Late in the game, Clinton has begun doing better with small donors, but only after she began punctuating every speech with an appeal for supporters to go to hillaryclinton.com and make a donation to allow her to keep going.

So what was barackobama.com strategy and how does it differ from Hillary's Web campaign, especially since Clinton's Web site eventually duplicated (superficially, at least) virtually every feature that Obama's offered—many of which are becoming standard equipment on campaign Web sites large and small?

Part of the answer is that the Obama campaign has Chris Hughes, who was one of the three co-founders of Facebook and now runs the campaign's my.barackobama.com, which itself is a sort of social network. Hughes is not a software developer (it was his Harvard roommate Mark Zuckerberg who wrote the original Facebook code), but he brought an appreciation how to nurture and manage online communities. "What I do now for the campaign is work on building out the technology to make sure the online community for Barack

Obama supporters is as robust as possible and as helpful as possible to the goal of getting people out to vote," Hughes says. At Facebook, he had been a product manager working on the development of features such as the "share this on Facebook" widget you see on news and blog sites all over the Web, and he retains an ownership stake in Facebook, a private company valued at more than $15 billion.

Having gotten to know Obama after helping set up a Facebook page for his senate office, Hughes took a leave to join the campaign full-time shortly after Obama announced his candidacy in February 2007. "As I got to know him more as an individual candidate, I saw him as completely in line with my own value system and what I felt the country was desperately in need of," Hughes says.

At the same time, Hughes was inspired by the idea of what Internet technology could do for Obama, and saw him as the right candidate to take advantage of it. "Online technology is at a place now that is pretty significantly different from where it was in 2004. I felt that if it was used well, and keyed to campaign goals of fundraising, and bringing people into the campaign, and bringing people to the polls to the vote, that it could make a significant difference."

"We want to make it super efficient, super streamlined, make it viral," says Steve Spinner, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor who is a member of Obama's National Finance Committee and spearheads the campaign's efforts to work with technology firms. Other campaigns have used the Web "but it's never been leveraged in this way, through chat groups and community groups, and through Facebook and other social networking sites," he says.

The Web site allows the campaign to be "owned by the masses," Spinner says, but he encourages even big donors to complete the transaction through the Web site, saving himself the time it would take to drive to their home or office to collect a check. Although hillaryclinton.com eventually matched most of the features of barackobama.com, the Obama campaign embraced the Web more enthusiastically and fielded many of those capabilities about six months ahead of the competition, Spinner says. "The DNA of everyone working on the Obama campaign is very much a startup mentality, where what matters is how you build it, how fast you roll it out, and how you tie it together."