How The Obama Campaign Harnessed the Power of the Internet

By Matthew Fraser & Soumitra Dutta (Originally published in The Guardian)

He may be older than most Facebook users, but Barack Obama understood the potential of social media to communicate and to raise funds - and left his 72-year-old opponent floundering

As the musician Brian Eno noted on the BBC's Question Time this week, Barack Obama's triumph was the first US presidential election that was won on the internet. While most pundits focused on the question of race, one largely overlooked factor was his powerful techno-demographic appeal.