Last night, the United States elected Barack Obama the next President of the country. Congratulations go out to him, his family and his campaign. And while you’ve heard it a million times, it truly his historic that we’ve elected the first African American to the office. I think we should all be proud.

Now, from the tech perspective, what lesson is there to be learned here?

The answer lies in two words: social media.

The Obama campaign has used the Internet and the new world of politics in a social media world. Let’s look at some facts:

• Twitter is a big deal. And Obama has 117,414 followers as of this writing. McCain, only 4,962. And Obama’s follower account literally went up by 70 just as I was typing this article.
• FriendFeed is also an up-and-coming, perhaps future mainstream social media site. And anyone who has spent any time on FriendFeed has noticed a very obvious hard-left leaning toward Obama.
• The Obama campaign even went so far as to release an Iphone application.

The Obama campaign won this election by engaging the younger generation. And the younger generation is quite active on social media. They hit all the right avenues, as seen above.

Anybody interested in making money online or marketing in general should study the Obama campaign. Any successful marketing campaign works by finding the right buttons to press on their audience to get them into a tizzy. Obama clearly did that. The simple word “change” summed it up quite nicely. It completely speaks to those who are disabused with our government. It also completely speaks to the partisans who just want the Republicans to fail. It was the perfect marketing term.

Positioning is also very important. Positioning is where you identify with a concept in the minds of your audience. Obama positioned himself as the anti-Bush. And he positioned McCain as 4 more years of Bush. Just brilliant.

But, underlying all of this is the campaign’s adept usage of the Internet and social media. The Obama site was designed to bring on participation. And the saturation of the campaign’s message across social media just rams it home. Politics, or any marketing campaign, is all about getting the proper message out to the right audience. Twitter turned into free promotion for the Obama campaign simply because they used it so adeptly.

For anybody in the older generation who continues to doubt the power of sites like Twitter, I think you should reconsider unless you completely want to fall behind the power curve. We live in a new age of communication now. A world where I can literally type a quick message into my phone from anywhere and have it broadcast to over 1,000 people (who currently follow me on Twitter).

The power of the idea has been decentralized. The TV and the radio are still important, but anything you see there now is directly impacted by what is seen online – like a magnetic field.

This campaign has shown the old game versus the new game. McCain was the old game and he competed as such. Obama played the new game, understanding that the Internet and social media is now where it’s happening. And we saw last night how that worked out for him.

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