Around the office at Palo Alto, we’ve talked a lot about the Obama campaign, particularly the small-donors fundraising program that radically outperformed the traditional large-donor model followed by the Clinton campaign and could be ushering in a new way of campaigning for national office.

Political preferences aside, the Obama team is interesting to me because their work looks a lot like what my team does: building informative websites that explain what we have to offer, maintaining and optimizing a store site to make it easy for lots of people to spend generally small amounts of money, sending followup emails to encourage additional business, engaging in social networks and Web 2.0 services to build awareness.

This is not groundbreaking stuff in 2008; it’s just groundbreaking the way that the Obama team has been able to apply it effectively (and with an offering that many people find compelling, obviously) to national politics.

If you are interested in reading more about this, the June issue of The Atlantic has a pair of articles about Obama’s online marketing activities and what it might portend for his possible presidency:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/obama-finance

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/ambinder-obama

Josh Cochrane
Director of Online Marketing
Palo Alto Software