Obama's new media maven schools Abu Dhabi

Andrew Bleeker, who headed the new / social media side of Barack Obama's election campaign, gave a really interesting talk today at the Social Media Forum in Abu Dhabi. Obama's engagement of a massive online audience - and conversion of this online crowd into an offline movement - is one of the main reasons he, not Hillary Clinton, is now president.

By the numbers, Obama's web operation raised a cool US$500 million, more than any other candidate in history. And they raised it primarily from more than three million small online donors. It also put together an email list of 12 million people - all who opted in via the website - who organised more than 200,000 offline, real world campaign events across the US.

I wasn't recording the speech so I won't use direct quotes, but here are a few of the interesting points from what was a great talk:

- You have to take the internet pretty seriously if you want to build a movement. The Obama campaign had 68 full time staff in its new media team, with whole teams working on individual projects like blogs, online video, external social networks, mobile / SMS, etc. It was expensive, but they now rule the free world.

- Email remains the single most important channel for online communications. Sure, social stuff like twitter and facebook have some nice bells and whistles. But email is where the real serious action is, where people spend most of their time and where you can address a properly massive audience.

- If you want web users to donate money or pay for your online product, don't just ask them for money straight up. Give them a very easy, quick way to "join" your offering, engage them and build a relationship, then hit them up for the cash when you mean something to them.

- How will they do things differently in 2012? Mobile will play a much bigger part, he thinks. Leveraging the ubiquity of the mobile phone, combined with its interesting location awareness and always-on internet connection (which everyone will have by 2012), could really build the movement. And now that they already have a major online movement, in terms of email lists, followers, signed up members etc, the focus of the next campaign will be much more about making the movement stay engaged and work harder, rather than just building its numbers.

- Disturbingly for a newspaper employee, the Obama campaign spent pretty much nothing on print advertising (they were in the papers every day, why advertise?). They spend $25 million on online ads, and "probably too much" on TV advertising. They put search ads alongside "controversial" keywords on google (ie like "obama birth certificate) which is a sharp way to deal with negative press etc.