It seems that the Obama administration is the first to realize the importance of the Internet as a tool to speak to the people

 Many analysts believe that one of the greatest “changes” that Barack Obama made, both as a candidate and as the president-elect, was to bring discussions about political and economical issues back to the people through the internet. Whether it was its 3-minute video about the economic depression or the ones uploaded on YouTube, it is clear that both Obama and his campaign staff knew that the web is an invaluable source to communicate with people and receive feedback from them.

Moreover, it seems that a government plan and team that is somehow linked to the web was sought after by most of the American citizens, as the web campaign immediately delivered some stunning results.

As an example, when president-elect Obama released his first video-address on the internet through the website Change.org, there have been already hundreds of thousands of people who had already watched it after first few days of release. In addition, the video was quickly uploaded to YouTube by several users and there were countless blogs which offered links to those URLs.

Still, when the video was uploaded on YouTube, Obama’s staff turned off the comment feature, making several bloggers and representatives at non-government organizations to criticize them for doing a one-way communication only.

Addressing this issue, Ellen Miller, director of the Sunlight Foundation, an administration transparency supervising organization, stated that the government should take advantage from the modern communication channels and provide citizens a way to give their opinions concerning the problems of the country, rather than just receiving messages from the authorities through the internet.

However, during the election campaign, Barack Obama promised that people would have the chance to send their feedback regarding any bureaucracy-related issues or any other critical situations in the country. He added that he would always give citizens five days to communicate their opinions prior to rolling out major changes in legislation.

Overall, it seems that Obama’s campaign 2.0 worked out very well. Many researches made during and after the election for the president of the United States clearly showed that the web-oriented efforts that the Democrats and, ultimately, Barack Obama himself, have been deeply rewarding ever since.

As an example, co-founders at the Personal Democracy Forum and the blog TechPresident, Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, concluded that Barrack Obama had over 24 times more supporters on Twitter.com than John McCain did, four times more on Facebook and just over three times more unique visitors on his webpage than his rival during the last week of the campaign. These figures are a clear statement that people that govern us today should adapt better to the internet era.