Oprah & Obama: The Leverage of Crowds

Yes, you can get lots of people to come out to see Oprah if she backs your campaign. But then what? Will these people actually vote for your candidate?

Well, check this out:

The [South Carolina] campaign attempted to organize that enthusiasm by asking the crowd to text their cell phone numbers to the campaign. Jeremy Bird and Anton Gunn, the campaign's field and political directors took the stage to ask the crowd to text their phone numbers to Obama's campaign. They also broke a Guinness World Record by conducting the world's largest phone bank, 36,426 people in the audience called four names of South Carolinian voters listed on the back of their tickets and asked them to support Barack Obama.

I've been in the marketing business long enough to know that when you appear at an event your number one job is to get leads. So I'm impressed that they did this -- and cell phone numbers, no less. But to get the crowd to call even more people? Priceless. I'm impressed.