Online Tools to Build Your Web Presence

The Obama campaign has received a lot of acclaim for its use of technology. Here are some tools you can use to build your presence online.

Scribd
Scribd is an online document-sharing tool that the Obama campaign utilized to publish issue papers. Your organization can use Scribd in much the same way. The service allows users to embed documents on blogs and websites. Here is an example using Obama's domestic hunger plan:

Barack Obama & Joe Biden's Plan for Tackling Domestic Hunger

Get your own at Scribd or explore others: Government Business leadership industry

You can also use with copies of organization bylaws and other public documents, or you could publish one-pagers and other literature that can be printed out and distributed by supporters. You can enable comments on your documents in order to get feedback from your members on a document.

Supported file formats are Word/Open Office documents, text files, Powerpoint presentations, PDF files, and Excel/Open Office spreadsheets.

Scribd provides a desktop bulk uploader to make the process of putting a large number of documents online as easy as possible, though it currently only runs on Windows XP/Vista.

Flickr
Flickr is an online photo service that was also utilized extensively by the Obama campaign. I have written about some of the uses of Flickr in a previous Future Majority post.

Tons of Flickr tools, applications, and plugins have been developed to complement the service, including the one below that creates an embeddable slide show from a photostream.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Sproutbuilder
Sproutbuilder is a tool that let's you create powerful widgets that can be deployed anywhere online. I published a tutorial on my personal site on how to create basic Sprout widgets. You can get an idea about the possibilities of these widgets on Sprout's How it Works page.

Those are just a few online tools that you can use to build your online presence. What tools have you or your organization used and how did you use them? Share in the comments.