A study of how businesses and other institutions are responding to consumer empowerment, Crowdsurfing was one of the first business books to talk about the role of social media as a campaigning tool. Crowdsurfers have the ability to mobilise, motivate and harness the enthusiasm of today’s technologically empowered consumers.

We wrote this about a prospective candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2007: ‘His use of social networks and some of the new media technologies exploited by his supporters represent the way forward for all politicians’ … ‘Obama’s ability to connect with a new generation of American voters, partly through the use of new media and his skill in convincing people that they were part of a movement for change … We don’t know whether this will take him all the way to the White House … but Obama … seems perfectly suited to the era of two-way politics.’