The Green[e]house Effect: a Weblog

The First Viral Candidate

I shared this idea with Jessica and Tim Jarrett by way of mentioning that I was about to whip up a freelance article on the subject, but Britt Blaser beat me to the punch with this post pointing out what's so revolutionary about the Dean campaign: it tapped into the community-building potential of the Internet to build a campaign that effectively markets itself. Here's how he explains it:

Let's reset our perceptions about the American political process:

The Howard Dean phenomenon isn't a campaign, it's a web app.

The Dean For America web app (blog, contribution link, funding report, blogroll) is the primary entry point for knowledge about the candidate. Through links to its related Dean Meetup web app, the campaign web app has attracted some 45,000 citizens to ubiquitous political meetings that are unprecedented at this point in a pre-primary roll out. Those people, the most Internet-connected progressives, were then moved to participate in a related web app called the MoveOn Primary. By attracting so many of the most-connected progressives to its candidate, the Dean web app was able to win the MoveOn primary in a landslide.

The campaign appears to be on a ride even it can't comprehend. As of a week ago, Sunday morning, 6/22, the campaign had raised $3.2 million in the previous 84 days. By tonight–8 days–it will have doubled that amount. At 2:47 am this morning, $2 million of the $2.8 raised had came through the Internet. Let's be clear: the campaign is now past the fund raising stage, it's in the fund receiving business. In a week, we'll see that this is a phenomenon feeding on itself like any other viral phenomenon.

Posted by Greg Greene at June 30, 2003 10:10 PM