One of the things that all of us who are fans of social networking and social computing concepts struggle with is proving the business value and power of social tools to our co-workers, customers and friends.  We’re always keeping an eye out for success stories that are easily understood and don’t sound like a lot of marketing hype.

Barack Obama, both through his presidential campaign and now with the presidential transition program, has been one of the most prominent examples of the massive success to be had by harnessing the power of social computing tools and technologies.

Whether you agree with his political views or not, it’s very hard to deny the level of organization, communication and coordination that he’s had with the American public through his campaign website, my.barackobama.com, as well as the newly minted change.gov.

It should come as no surprise, then, that key to this success was the fact that Barack had worked closely with Chris Hughes, formerly a co-founder of Facebook, who undoubtedly help shape my.barackobama.com into what it is today.

Notable points:

• Both sites feature a healthy use of blogging to broadcast changes and news.
• Both sites leverage multi-channel delivery of information.  SMS text messages, RSS feeds, and Twitter updates are all key delivery channels, allowing the maximum amount of broadcast range with very low cost.  And unlike some sites (ahem, CNET), the entire article is included in the RSS feed, and not just a small excerpt.
• Video is used frequently, but in ways that enhance the experience.  YouTube is generally the host, which provides an interesting way to draw people into the sites, since the original videos on YouTube link back to the sites where they were posted, and people can discover the videos there before they know about the sites themselves.
• The commenting system in use is IntenseDebate which allows for up/down voting, reputation tracking (total number of times a person has been up-voted for their comments), and email-enabled replies (where users can reply by email).  IntenseDebate also supports the OpenID standard for identification/login.  Again, multi-channel, highly accessible services provide the foundation.
• Visual design is emphasized, and both sites have a clean and professional look, regardless of browser type.  If it’s not “usable”, then it’s not accessible to everyone, which is likely the reason that the sites are easy to use and the information is well organized.

Overall, it’s not surprising that a political candidate has managed to use social computing tools to bring transparency to government.  After all, that’s precisely what fans of social computing talk about with the “web 2.0” movement: transparently democratizing the web through tools that allow anyone to contribute, with multiple channels of accessibility and delivery.

Filed under: Consumer Web, Enterprise Web, Social Computing