By Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta
Thought leaders at INSEAD

Barack Obama’s electoral triumph was the first American presidential election won on the Web. If Franklin Delano Roosevelt was America’s first radio president and John F. Kennedy was the country’s first television president, Barack Obama is its first Internet president.
This watershed was largely overlooked during the presidential campaign. While most pundits were focused on the question of race, speculating whether Americans would elect a black man to the White House, Obama was busy defeating his rival thanks to his powerful techno-demographic appeal. His popularity with young voters was especially high.
Obama enjoyed a groundswell of support among the Facebook generation. Obama captures 70 percent of young On Election Day, he captured nearly 70 percent of the vote among Americans under 25. In a word, Obama enjoyed a groundswell of support among the Facebook generation. The vote has even been dubbed the “Facebook election.”
Obama, who was constantly thumbing his BlackBerry during the campaign, had a shrewd understanding of the electoral power of direct Web-based political mobilization. His campaign leveraged not only Facebook and YouTube, but also MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, Digg, BlackPlanet, LinkedIn, and other Web 2.0 platforms.
At 47, Obama was older than the average Facebook member, but he proved to be a natural Web politician.
On his personal Facebook profile, he named his favorite musicians as Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder and Bob Dylan, and listed his pastimes as basketball, writing and “loafing w/kids” (note the hip shorthand).
The 72-year-old John McCain, by contrast, never managed to connect with voters online. McCain: Missing in action on the Internet McCain’s campaign struggled to give its candidate a Web presence, but compared to Obama’s online blitzkrieg, the former war hero was missing in action on the Internet. The cold numbers tell the story.

Obama counted some three million “friends” on Facebook and two million more on 15 other social networking sites. He also boasted 13 million names on an email list and three million receiving SMS messages coming directly from Obama’s famous Blackberry. The MyBarackObama.com Web site was clocking more than eight million monthly visits, including 35,000 volunteer groups that raised $30 million on the site. On YouTube, the Obama channel attracted more than 97 million video views by some 18 million channel visits.
Compare that to YouTube presence: only 330 videos were uploaded to the JohnMcCain.com channel, which attracted just over 28,000 subscribers.
The McCain channel attracted barely more than million visits and some 25 million video views. Obama beat McCain four to one on YouTube. Obama attracted double the Web site traffic and had five times more Facebook friends. On the microblogging platform Twitter, Obama could count on more than 112,000 supporters “tweeting” to get him elected. McCain, for his part, had only 4,600 followers on Twitter. In the world of politics where victories and defeats can be measured with great precision, these stats graphically illustrate how Obama crushed McCain on the Web.
The YouTube coup de grace was the blockbuster “Yes We Can” videoclip. The viral circulation of that video, watched by millions of Americans only days after it was first posted, gave Obama solid electoral credibility in Middle America. Suddenly he was like a pop star on MTV. The video wasn’t even made by the Obama campaign team: it was produced spontaneously by the hip hop star Will.i.am, from the group Black Eyed Peas.
That video offered a classic example of bottom-up civic engagement and its viral network effects. Obama’s masterful leveraging of Web 2.0 platforms marked a major e-ruption in electoral politics – in America and elsewhere. Political campaigning is now shifting from old-style political machines, which are vertical topdown organizations, toward the horizontal dynamics of online social networks.
Web 2.0 platforms like Facebook and Twitter, by their basic social architecture, are a perfect medium for grassroots political movements.
There are no barriers to entry on sites like Facebook and YouTube. Everybody can participate, building social capital online.
Resurgence of social capital For those who a decade ago were lamenting the decline of ‘social capital’ in America, Web 2.0 platforms have emerged as powerful tools of social interaction, civic ngagement, and political mobilization. Unlike traditional means of civic action dependant on complex organizations like political parties, there are no barriers to entry in the Web 2.0 sphere, which as the Obama campaign demonstrated is low cost and high impact.
Web 2.0 networks like Facebook not only allow citizens to organize themselves by bypassing traditional organizational structures, they also allow political and business leaders to engage and communicate directly with their constituencies without going through traditional intermediaries like the media.

President Obama, for example, used his Change.gov site to speak directly to Americans and today a White House blog serves the same purpose.

He is also the first president who, during a White House press conference, has called regarding a question from a Web-only journalist. These are signs of powerful changes. Web 2.0 social networks diffuse power away from institutions and toward people, providing effective platforms for a genuine expression of bottom-up expression of citizen sovereignty.
Web-based citizen empowerment can potentially strengthen liberal democracies and, more importantly, bring democracy to countries currently living under tyranny and despotism in its many forms. Call it Politics 2.0.