Final votes are in and we know now that Barack Obama is the newly elected president of the United States of America. How did he win?

Good campaigning, lots of money and loads of support made it all possible, or did it?

It would seem that this election was the first that made so much use of the internet. While both campaigns used the web for fund-raising, Obama’s camp certainly knew the power of the Web and capatilized on it from every angle. I stand to be corrected, but they used comments and opinions from various online sources like blogs, social networks and social tools like myspace, facebook, youtube and twitter to gain insights and obtain opinions from their supporters and users online.

For me this was the best decision they ever made. Obviously they had do some research to find out where the bulk of their voters and supporters would be and from there lay out an extensive online strategy to make the campaign a success. It is interesting that both campaigns saw the internet as an opportunity, but only one campaign truly believed it.

“Both campaigns had similarly slick official websites, cultivated bloggers and made heavy use of YouTube, creating their own channels on the video-sharing site which did not even exist four years ago to help push their message.”

But the Obama campaign took its efforts one step further, creating a massive grass-roots online network of volunteers and created a very elaborate database that allowed the Obama campaign to micro-target all of its efforts online and offline.

Julie Germany, director of George Washington University’s Institute for Politics Democracy & the internet made some very interesting comments.

“A lot of what the Obama campaign did online was trying to encourage people to do something for the campaign,” said Germany.

“It was not about passively absorbing information.”

“From the very beginning the Obama audience tended to be younger, more web-savvy,” said Germany. “The internet was a natural tool for them to use to reach that supporter base.

“The McCain campaign felt their base of support was different,” she said.

Here are some interesting articles highlighting the same opinions:

• Obama surfs web to White House
• Propelled by Internet, Barack Obama Wins Presidency
• Internet key to Obama victories
• With a revamped site, Obama’s Internet reign continues
• Obama’s Secret Weapons: Internet, Databases and Psychology