A lot of citizens particularly youth identify and empathize with Obama and the vision he presented. But how did he persuade them to do that? Many of us would like to see what made up the engine that drove the Obama juggernaut? Was it the story of a man whose message perfectly married the mood of the country at the moment, as many pundits say is the driver of large election wins?

Or was the win founded on extraordinary technical skills which were able to leverage the Net, reach out to where the people actually were and capture the attention of the country? Was it expertise in the technology and communications that allowed Obama, a freshman senator to come out of darkness to capture this presidency with such commanding numbers?

Obama’s leveraging of technology reveals lessons a business of any kind can certainly learn from. To some extent, this has to be true. Obama’s teams’ mastery of the tools and viral energy of the Internet is what gained Obama millions of email addresses, massive volunteers, and small donors whom he could tap repeatedly to keep his treasury overflow.

Social Media Lessons from the Obama Campaign

• Start early
• Build to scale
• Innovate where necessary, do everything else incrementally better
• Make it easy to find, forward and act
• Pick where you want to play
• Channel online enthusiasm into specific, targeted activities that further the campaign goals
• Integrate online advocacy into every element of the campaign

Definitely we should re-arrange the last two statements for our own needs, replacing “campaign” with your organization or website goals and integrating your own call to action into every element. With those two small changes Obama has formed a road map that carries all of us on the Net out of darkness and into the limelight.