Since then nearly 6700 have created logos using the website and a total of $651 has been donated by 24 people. That’s not a lot of money or donations really, but I’m sure the number of exposures will be much higher.

Barack now has 156 more pledged delegates than Hillary Clinton and needs just another 183 to become the Democrat candidate. Significantly less than the 339 that Hillary needs to beat him.

Perhaps this is down to Barack’s inventive use of new media to support his campaign. A strategy, which Hillary seems to be replicating. In April 2007, Barack started using Twitter to aid his campaign. In January 2008, Hillary followed suit and started microblogging too. Since then Hillary has posted 139 times, whereas Barack has posted a mere 115 times.

If frequency isn’t the key to using Twitter successfully then what is?

I think interaction. Although neither candidate has actually entered into a two-way conversation with their followers. I think following other users has been a crucial factor in Barack’s success. Barack follows almost 30,000 other users, whereas Hillary follows nobody. No one. Not a sausage. I think people like to have followers, it feels good, even if they know that their followers are not really reading what they have to say. So it’s not surprising that Barack has over 25,000 more followers than poor old Hillary, who has just 3,745 in total.

In less than 24 hours it has ‘sold out’ which means that people have given all of the 250,000 gifts. As far as I’m aware I think it’s the first time one of the free branded gifts has sold out on the day it was released. That’s quite an achievement not least because it means that they have gained a minimum of 500,000 exposures in one day from people sending and receiving the gift. Not to mention all the people who have seen the gift on people’s facebook profiles, newsfeeds and the homepage, and will continue to do so. I don’t think gifts are ever removed from people’s Facebook profiles.

The facebook application is a clever concept too. It’s like some of the other applications in that it allows you to send free gifts to your friends. The difference with the Ben and Jerry’s application is that it allows you to send pictures of the different flavours of ice cream. Like mini adverts for their products. Furthermore it’s sparked discussion amongst fans of the company. People are waxing lyrical about their favourite flavours and making calls for Ben and Jerry’s to bring back discontinued flavours. I hope they make great use of that feedback.

Giving away free Ice Cream in the Scoop Shops is a great idea too. I just wish I lived near to somewhere that was participating in it!

UPDATE: Presumably due to popular demand the availability of the free gift has been doubled from 250,000 to 500,000. I wonder how long it will take for all those gifts to run out.

UPDATE: All 500,000 free gifts have now sold out. A minimum of 1 million exposures globally isn’t bad going in under 36 hours.

I think embracing new media and technologies is a very clever move for a candidate whose campaign is based around change. Also the viral campaign seems to have been started as a reaction to Obama’s supporters already using his logo online to support him. I also like how all of the user generated logo’s are uploaded to Flickr after they’ve been approved. I imagine inappropiate images could be quite detrimental to the campaign so approving them first is quite a wise step.

The only negatives of the campaign that I can see is that it is not targetted terrifically well. I created a logo and I’m not an American voter. However I imagine many of the people who did create logo’s are Americans. Although not all of them may be registered to vote as some of the images feature children who are too young to vote.

Also the campaign has only raised $520 so far from 18 people, which isn’t much considering more than 4000 people have created logos using the website. I think the website itself may have cost more than that to create, unless of course it was created for free by a supporter’s web design company. That said, the campaign has still reached more than 4000 people who will probably reach even more by featuring the logo on their blogs, facebook profiles, flickr accounts, msn messenger profiles, websites or whatever.