The election before the election is finally over – Barack Obama has secured the Democratic party’s nomination with Hillary Clinton expected to formally stand down her campaign sometime today. The pundits are falling over themselves to analyse how the relatively unknown freshman senator managed to overcome Clinton who entered the primary race as the prohibitive favourite.

Form a small business perspective, one of the more interesting take-aways comes from Steven Strauss in TheStreet.com. He likens Obama to an unknown, under-funded start-up going up against a gigantic, well-known and well-resourced institutional brand (Clinton).

So, how did the little guy prevail against the established goliath? By being unique, playing smart and competing to his strengths. Read Spencer’s full article for the details.

The unprecedented slugfest in the Democratic presidential primary campaign in the US seems to be finally drawing to a close. Most pundits are backing Senator Obama to overcome the dogged challenge of former First Lady Hillary Clinton.

Much press analysis has been focussed on the complicated permutations of the US primary system (pledged delegate counts vs. super-delegate backing vs. popular vote, etc). However, I personally feel that the really interesting story here is how the Obama campaign has successfully leveraged the power of the Internet to overcome the seemingly invincible lead that Hillary Clinton started off the campaign with.

BBC News has a good write-up on Mr. Obama’s internet strategy that is well worth a read.

As the article points out, the internet favours the outsider – a good lesson for small businesses trying to outmaneuver incumbent competition. The Obama team launched their campaign with their website fully developed and ready for action – another lesson to small businesses to not treat their web presence as an afterthought.

The Obama campaign also embraced emerging social networking tools to rapidly mobiilse an army of volunteers and amass a huge funds war-chest. In fact, Mr Obama’s was only persuaded to enter the race in the first place when an unofficial MySpace page quickly gathered 160,000 supporters.

At this stage, the Obama campaign’s momentum seems likely to carry him all the way to the White House. The US will then have not only its first black President, but also its most web-savvy President to date. It would be interesting to see how he would leverage the power of the internet while in the Oval Office.