Barack Obama made history yesterday by becoming the first African American President. His entire campaign was flawless and can easily be a case study for a marketing and advertising class. His internet marketing was especially brilliant. His YouTube page has had over 20,000,000 channel views (John McCain’s page has just over 2,000,000 views), and his Facebook Fan Page kept supporters (over 3,000,000) up-to-date with daily updates on the his upcoming events, appearances and speeches.
Barack Obama was lauded with having an amazingly seamless and beautiful website, far superior to any of his rivals. Obama is so web 2.0 that he instantly connected with the youth of our nation reaching out for support in very nontraditional ways. Obama has also started a new site, Change.gov allowing ordinary people to feel included into the happenings of the government.
This brings me to the new whitehouse.gov website. Obama and his team certainly understand the importance of branding because the new White House website matches the look and feel of change.gov, his youtube page, facebook page and campaign website. CNN.com posted an article about the website this morning. The website is very interactive including a blog and allowing people to contact the president via email (500 characters max. meaning you can only say “I love you” so many times). The website is so clean and sophisticated to puts past websites to shame. Here are a few screen shots from past Whitehouse.gov home pages.
December 1998 (Remember the internet was still new)
July 2002
June 2007
The New Website - January 2009
