Netroots and Grassroots Campaigning

The new my.barackobama.com is a good example of the power of "netroots" campaigning. Within 24 hours of launch, more than 1,000 different focus groups have been formed and the blogging is really taking off.

A lot of this is carry-over from sites like Facebook where the Obama group has more than 250,000 members. The next largest Facebook group has only something over 50,000 members.

Howard Dean used this type of social networking to raise a lot of money and support, which unfortunately was squandered too early in the campaign even months before the first poll. They quickly ran out of money during the actual election phase. I'm confident though that this will not happen in this case.

The key is transforming all this net activity into corresponding grassroots activity in the "real world" i.e., meetups, organizing, fundraising, precinct walking, phone banks, etc.

Dan from the barackobama.com blogs showed a chart from alexa.com that shows the big jump in traffic, reach and pageviews that has occured since launch time. The site has really skyrocketed above the competitors in all categories. The alexa.com page is displayed below.