More than two years since Barack Obama’s presidential election campaign, the numbers are still staggering. $770 million was raised, roughly 65% of that online. There were 3.2 million individual donors, with the average donation under $100.

This is completely different from traditional political fundraising, which revolved about dinners and other events costing $2300 a ticket — the maximum unreportable donation donation allowable from a couple at that time under US electoral laws. Obama’s campaign really did reach out and mobilise millions of ordinary Americans.

Yes, millions. The progressive Democratic Party network is now 15 million people online.

Online social networking tools made all this possible, sure, but the success came through the clever application of those tools. The key word here is “personal”.

The campaign’s central managers provided a framework within which individual campaign workers could do their own thing in their own communities. The technology was created specifically for the campaign, but you could do all of it with Facebook and a few optional extras. And while fundraising was obviously a key goal, so was involvement.

• At a rally with 10,000 people, Obama’s team would ask everyone with a mobile phone to SMS a certain number to pledge a $5 donation. Or, even better, a 1900 number so the donation is charged directly to their phone bill. Bang! $50,000 raised in 60 seconds. And you’ve captured their phone number.
• Once you have someone’s contact details, you can ask for more. Another $5? Can I just have your age please? How about an hour of your time to help the campaign?
• Every donor was sent a thank-you letter — not in bulk by an anonymous central office administrator but individually by a real person from their own neighbourhood.
• People who volunteered their time to door-knock were given the names and addresses of 25 people in their neighbourhood and a training video explaining how to campaign legally. Once they knew what these people’s hot button issues were, that was fed into the database, and they could be sent personalised campaign material addressing their concerns.
• Everyone spoken to was asked to suggest another 25 people who needed to be convinced to change their vote.
• The central system allowed campaign workers to organise their own groups and local events in their own way. Eventually there were 20,000 groups from a national “Latinos for Obama” to thousands of “My neighbourhood for Obama”, who between them organised more that 200,000 offline events.
• Campaigners could blog about their activities and post photos and videos. More than 100,000 people were blogging regularly. 1800 videos were uploaded, and more than 14 million people-hours spent watching them.
• The campaign office created a “Fight the Smears” website debunking the negative myths about Obama, then bought Google keyword advertising. If people searched for “obama arab” they’d see a link to that website.
• On election day, local campaign workers phoned people to remind them to vote. 6 million calls.
• There was measurement at every step. What worked? What didn’t? That information was shared so everyone learned.

The election of Barack Obama was Politics 2.0, the election of the representatives. These same tools can be used for Government 2.0, the running of the nation and our communities.

Some of the examples we’ve seen are:

• In Kentucky, residents wanted to stop a controversial condo (apartment block) development because there’d been poor communications from the authorities and a lack of opportunity for community input. Using these techniques, they gathered 1600 active members on a Facebook group to save the existing building. They organised 20 events, packed the City hearings with observers, and eventually had the proposal killed
• Here in Australia, the Hugh Bamford Reserve Protection Group saved a park at North Bondi in Sydney. The Waverley Council issued the planning information near Christmas for a $20 million industrial-zone development on protected land. Local residents gathered more than 2500 members through their Facebook group, forcing the Council to extend the time for public comment. Eventually the Mayor caved in and pulled her support for the development even before that time had expired.
• MillionTreesNYC is a public-private partnership to buy a tree, or suggest a spot for a tree, or offer to dig the hole and plant the tree, and link everyone up. 97,000 trees have been planted so far
• In the UK, FixMyStreet allows people to report potholes, illegal dumping, broken street lighting and graffiti. An Australian version is under development, It’s Buggered, Mate, where you simply tell it “What’s buggered?”, “Where?” and “How exactly is it buggered?”

The key to all of this is building your list of people by making personal connections, and maintaining that relationship by staying in touch.

• You don’t marry someone on the first date. So talk regularly. Not only every six months because that’s too infrequent, but not every ten seconds either because that’ll turn them off.
• Be relevant. Obama’s biggest fundraising day was when Sarah Palin made a disparaging comment about community fundraisers. They capitalised on that quickly be getting a message out the very same day, “We’ll show her”!
• Be authentic. Don’t send press releases to list of supporters. Nobody wants to read press releases. Emails need to come from a person, and be written in a personal tone. Senator Al Franken, in his election campaign, would email out scanned images of hand-written letters.
• Lower the barriers to entry. Make it easy for people to engage, in little ways. The most active campaigners for Obama were females aged 53 to 57. Design your systems to suit.
• Raise your expectations. Ask people to do stuff. Ask them to host a dinner. Ask them to pay. Ask them to write comments. Ask them to refer your product. You’ll be surprised how many say “yes”.
• Foster your regulars. Give them special access, special privileges.
• Measure everything — from different subject lines in emails, different styles of videos, whatever. As an aside, I discovered recently that the Huffington Post writes two headlines for every story, and after five minutes chooses the one which generates more click-throughs.

James Carville used to say in the 1990s “It’s the economy, stupid.” Now it’s “It’s the network, stupid.” How big is your network? How well are you using the tools to create and focus that network?

The power of individuals to organise themselves is the big change. And organisations who don’t take this on board are in denial. And yet it’s more of a cultural change, not a technological one.

As Joe Trippi said, it’s not about the tools, it’s about what you do with them. It’s about the listening. And it’s being willing to have the conversation.

Bonus links

• Time to dump 20th Century “leadership”?, in which I suggest that we need a very different style of manager to work in Government 2.0.
• Risk, Fear and Paranoia: Perspective, People!, being my presentation at Penny Clarke MLC’s NSW Sphere event.

Episode 39 of Stilgherrian Live is now online for your post-facto viewing pleasure.

After so many fine nominations for “Cnut of the Week” it was difficult to pick a shortlist, but I applied my arbitrary judgement and narrowed it down to: Peter Costello (final score 8%) for refusing to understand that he is yesterday’s man; rugby player Brett Stewart (11%), recently accused of sexual assault; rugby players in general (36%); and our winner, Anna Bligh (44%), whose political campaign website for the Premiership of Queensland doesn’t list an email address or even a contact form, and who uses Twitter but doesn’t respond in any way.

You’d think that after the success of Barack Obama’s online campaigning, they’d get themselves some sort of clue — especially given the string of Obama advisers giving speeches here recently like Ben Self and Joe Trippi. But no.

I was disturbed to see that someone was watching Stilgherrian Live on a 42-inch TV.

The grainy 320 x 240-pixel footage must look very grubby at that size! That limit is imposed by Ustream. The iSight camera in my MacBook Pro can deliver 640 x 480, so we’ll be able to improve that one day.

But, it is lovely to be building a regular audience. Someone told me there were more than 60 viewers at one point last night?

I reckon it was the best program I’ve done so far, even if the William Shatner theme tended to dominate. What do you think?

This Thursday 26 February I’m liveblogging from Microsoft’s second Politics and Technology Forum in Canberra. This year’s theme is “Campaigning Online”.

Keynote speaker is Joe Trippi (pictured), heralded as the man who reinvented political campaigning thanks to his work on many US campaigns for the Democrats, and author of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet and the Overthrow of Everything. He’s also a political analyst with MSNBC and much more, as his Wikipedia entry or Twitter stream reveal.

The political panellists are federal Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull (who tweets as @TurnbullMalcolm) and Labor’s Minister for Finance and Deregulation, Lindsay Tanner, who’s been pushing for better government use of technology for some time.

Our MC is Mark Pesce, who himself has covered similar topics in presentations like Hyperpolitics, American Style.

Bookmark this page, ‘cos the liveblog will start here at around 8.45am Canberra time on 26 February.

If you can’t see the CoveritLive tool immediately below, then you’re not using a compatible browser. Anything written without attribution will be from me.

Feel free to add questions and comments. The Twitter hashtag for the end is #poltech.

My presence at the Politics and Technology Forum is made possible thanks to Nick Hodge and Microsoft.

There’s lots and lots of good material to read here, but I don’t want it to dominate my home page so they’re all over the jump.

• Famous Twits: 50 Celebrities on Twitter | Laurel Papworth: If you’re after “famous people” on Twitter, here’s a good a list as any to start with.
• When Aeroflot Passengers Rejected Their Pilot | Moscow Times: The pilot was drunk. Aeroflot’s reaction? “Meh. He only has to press a button. No problem.” You can’t make this stuff up!
• Facebook, MySpace drive mobile web use | News.com.au: A survey of 500 people by Sweeney Research has shown 31% of Australians access the web via their mobile phone handset. Or, if you prefer, more than two-thirds still don’t.
• P J O’Rourke: How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink: A classic O’Rourke rant from 1986.
• 2nd Annual PR & New Media Summit 2009: There’s a bunch of familiar names presenting at this conference on 3 to 4 March. I doubt I’ll make this one, but you never know.
• Rich man, poor man: study shows body language can indicate socioeconomic status | Physorg.com: A new study in Psychological Science reveals that non-verbal cues can give away a person’s socioeconomic status (SES). Volunteers whose parents were from upper SES backgrounds displayed more disengagement-related behaviors compared to participants from lower SES backgrounds. In addition, when a separate group of observers were shown 60 second clips of the videos, they were able to correctly guess the participants’ SES background, based on their body language.
• So Many iPhone Apps, So Little Time | NYTimes.com: Why the iPhone app store and the Ocarina application in particular represent a whole new wave of software development.
• A Definition Of Piracy In The Digital Age | Link: I’d imagined that the use of the term “piracy” to cover copyright infringement was a recent invention of the music and movie industries. Not so. Rick Welykochy traces it back to 1906.
• Drugs ‘legal in 10 years’ claim | BBC News: The Chief Constable of North Wales reminds us (from just over a year ago) that prohibition doesn’t work. Half of all reported crime is about feeding a drug habit.
• Why telcos should fear Twitter | ZDNet Australia: The short answer is that Twitter can replace SMS with a far more flexible tool. And about time. Telcos have been charging the equivalent of $1 million per gigabyte to send an SMS. It’s a rort.
• How to troubleshoot the POP3 Connector in Windows Small Business Server 2003 | Microsoft: What it says. This article didn’t help me with today’s problem, but it will certainly come in useful.
• Ecstasy ‘no worse than horse riding’ | News.com.au: Professor David Nutt, chairman of the UK Home Office’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), is a scientist and can do the maths. “This attitude raises the critical question of why society tolerates — indeed encourages — certain forms of potentially harmful behaviour but not others such as drug use.”
• Aussies OK pirated software for personal use | CRN Australia: A study commissioned by Microsoft found that almost half of Australians believe it’s OK to use pirated software for personal use. Many can’t tell the difference between genuine and illegal software.
• Give Me Liberty and Give Me Death Search Magazine: American satirist P j O’Rourke writes about his experience of being diagnosed with cancer.
• Your Vision for 2009 | GetUp! Campaign Actions: Political campaigning organisation GetUp! presents the results of its latest survey of members.
• So why is filtering a pointless exercise? | sirchriss: An education technologist outlines why trying to provide a filtered Internet is ultimately self-defeating.
• How Journalism Students Used Twitter to Report on Australian Elections | PBS MediaShift: Former ABC journalist Julie Posetti describes how her students used Twitter to cover Australian elections.
• Politics and Technology Forum: Campaigning Online | Microsoft Events: The second annual Microsoft Politics & Technology Forum is in Canberra on 26 February. I’ll be liveblogging it on this website, and there’ll be a special Stilgherrian Live Road Trip on the way. Details soon. Keynote speaker is Joe Trippi, who’s run several (unsuccessful) Democrat US presidential campaigns, and speakers include Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull and Minister for Finance and Deregulation Lindsay Tanner.
• Why Teens Don’t Twitter | A Meaningful Life: Marc Lehmann’s take on the reason for the (apparent) older demographic profile of Twitter users.
• Text, text, text | Inside Story: Is the energy, liveliness and to-the-pointness of text-messaging already history, asks Richard Johnstone in this article from October 2008.
• Liam Vickery’s Blog: Top Aussies On Twitter: Liam Vickery’s personal choices for the top Australian twitterers. I don’t know Liam, but have seen him about on Twitter.
• Forgive Us Our Debts | newmatilda.com: Is debt really all that bad? In this extract from her new book, Margaret Atwood measures the changing moral weight of debt.
• Entering the Mobile Ecosystem | Silicon Federation: "Would you like to put your brand on a device that customers can't be without, a device they reach for many times a day?" A seminar on creating an iPhone app for your business.
• Spot the difference? | middleclassgirl.com: Whatever happened to TV presenter Naomi Robson?
• Ten Tweets about Twitter | the [non]billable hour: Some rather good tips to getting your head around Twitter.
• Global recession – where did all the money go? | guardian.co.uk: This set of diagrams steps through the different kinds of money, showing why the global financial system is unstable and, effectively, a giant pyramid scheme.
• Of Time and Twitter | Woolly Days: Another nice overview of Twitter’s rise, with an emphasis on journalism. However I suspect that the story of an “all-Twitter newspaper” from Scotland is a hoax.
• Twitter journalism, beyond happenstance | Almighty Link: “When US Airways Flight 1549 made an emergency landing on the Hudson River, a few non-journalists used their investigative instincts and some basic Twitter tools to find details about the news and share it with the world.” This article is another exploring the boundaries of who is and isn’t “doing journalism”.
• More Silliness: Congressman Wants to Ban “Silent” Cell Phone Cameras | Lauren Weinstein’s Blog: There’s a push of sorts in the US to make all phone cameras make a sound when they take a photo. As Weinstein points out, there’s no evidence there’s actually a problem to address, there are many other kinds of camera smaller than phone cameras, and even phone cameras can shoot in video mode — where a continuous sound would ruin the audio recording.
• Twitter | The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry: Stephen Fry, who now has 88,000+ followers on Twitter and rising rapidly, explains how he uses Twitter at this incredibly high volume — and requests understanding and a bit of self-help.
• Virtual Assistant – Nicole Hammett Business Support: This website isn’t the most brilliant graphic design (it’s a bit generic), but it builds trust in the business for two simple reasons: It explains clearly what this person does, and the rate card says very clearly what it’ll cost. None of this vague “our rates are competitive” and then asking you for all of your contact details. The only real turn-off for me is the generic stock-photography image of a harried office worker (what value does that add?) when it’d be better to have a photo of Nicole herself.