<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"Update: The Obama campaign released Dashboard to all supporters in an email sent Thursday, June 21.\nPresident Obama's 2008 campaign is seen by many as the first successful online campaign, and while his Republican rivals are certainly beginning to master the social side of campaigning, Obama's 2012 team is doubling down on digital with a new platform being released Wednesday.\nThe new platform, called Dashboard, will attempt to bring nearly everything that a brick-and-mortar field office does into the digital space. Obama's volunteers will be able to use the service to make calls to recruit others to join the team, organize campaign events such as voter registration drives, and communicate with leadership \u2014 all from their desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone devices, according to The Wall Street Journal.\n\u201CDashboard is our online field office \u2014 a hub for campaign volunteers and supporters to communicate with each other and become members of neighborhood teams,\" Katie Hogan, a spokeswoman for the Obama campaign, told Mashable. \nDashboard, which will feature a Facebook-style interface, introduces social and data-driven elements, reflective of the Obama campaign's love affair with metrics. Obama volunteers will be able to use the platform to connect with other supporters and join local volunteer teams with specific missions, such as LGBT for Obama groups, which are tasked with reaching out to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender voters.\nOn the staff side, campaign leadership will be able to set and track specific goals for individual Obama supporters and volunteer groups. Those supporters and groups will engage in friendly competition with one another to achieve those goals \u2014 a hallmark of the 2008 Obama campaign.\n\"Supporters can use the tool to set goals, communicate those goals and see what other supporters are doing,\" added Hogan. \"Supporters who want to be engaged can go to Dashboard, message other supporters in their area and have a conversation about how to get started, it provides a good volunteer experience online that is directly tied to our field operation goals.\u201D\nDashboard, which has been in development for nearly a year, builds upon similar software and MyBarackObama.com, which was used during Obama's 2008 run to help volunteers perform some tasks, such as phone banking, from the comfort of their own home. \n\nSEE ALSO: Republicans Launch Facebook App to Defeat Obama\nKeya Dannenbaum, founder of ElectNext, welcomes the new platform.\n\"[The Obama campaign] is making political advocacy social and mobile and that is a move that can only expand the pool of people who will get engaged and involved, and that's great,\" said Dannenbaum. \"I would fully expect something similar from the Romney campaign.\"\nMitt Romney's digital team is indeed doing something similar: they're using \"MyMitt,\" a similar in-house social network that lets Romney supporters connect with one another and volunteer for the campaign. Republicans as a whole, meanwhile, are engaging their supporters on Facebook with the Social Victory Center, a Facebook app that allows right-leaning voters to connect with one another directly on the popular social network.\nZachary Green, a political Twitter consultant, noted something missing from the new service.\n'Social media actions are curiously absent from the Dashboard, and Obama's campaign has never quite done it right,\" said Green. \"They have built a page to Tweet your Representative, as though anyone in D.C. would change their vote based on a Twitter feed.\"\nWould you use a presidential campaign's social network to get involved with politics? Sound off in the comments below.\nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, PeterPhoto"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2012/05/23/obama-online-tool/>