INNOVATE THIS:THIS TIME last year, Barack Obama was the most popular man in the world, an extraordinary candidate settling into the White House having run a thrilling and brilliant electoral campaign; the antidote to the sullied and cynical George W Bush era.

By contrast, the first anniversary of Obama's inauguration was notable for the hostility and the general air of disappointment it garnered – the name Jimmy Carter was mentioned several times – even among his most ardent supporters. American columnist Paul Krugman writes a New York Timesblog called The Conscience of a Liberal, which he used to browbeat Obama in the hours following the Democrats' loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat. This was Ted Kennedy's fiefdom for 47 years until his death last August and now, as love for Obama seeps away among swing voters, it's in Republican hands. In a piece entitled 'He's Not The One We've Been Waiting For', Krugman wrote: "Im pretty close to giving up on Mr Obama, who seems determined to confirm every doubt I and others ever had about whether he was ready to fight for what his supporters believed in."

The president’s defenders, of which there remain many, cite the impossibly high expectations he brought in to the White House and that the real world – Afghanistan, the Health Bill, the economy – made a coming down inevitable. This is true, but the problem is more deep-rooted than that and relates to the mechanics of the campaign; it is this that is now coming back to haunt him.

Obama is the Web 2.0 president, by which I don’t mean he used YouTube to communicate to voters, which of course he did. There is something else, something about the spread of an idea that is different now and it has a relevance far beyond American politics.

The global brands that were built in the 20th century, such as Ford or Coca Cola, were without exception built by television: 30 second ads shouting their name from the box in the corner. This is now the exception rather than the norm. Think of the great brands that have emerged over the past five years – Google, Twitter, YouTube, Obama – they were built differently, using the internet’s extraordinary ability to spread an idea like a virus. They share another characteristic, which is that they are, like great actors or works of art, a blank canvas onto which we project our own dreams, aspirations and prejudices. Obama was marketed as a technology brand. He, like Google or Twitter, was seen as a gatekeeper, a route through to another world, a place where we can be happy.

His brand was encapsulated perfectly in the iconic Hope poster created by the underground graffiti artist Shepard Fairey. The background story of that image is worth revisiting now as Obama battles to show the substance beneath the surface.

The New Yorkermagazine described Hope as the "most efficacious political poster since Uncle Sam Needs You". Fairey created it by taking an existing photograph and laying his own design over the top; the original snap was taken by Manny Garcia, a freelance photographer working for the Associated Press news agency. (Both AP and Garcia are separately suing Fairey for "stealing" their photograph and last year the artist was arrested at one of his own shows for vandalism to property, for which he received a suspended sentence).

Critically, rather than sell the poster for money, Fairey chose to distribute it copyright free over the net, allowing anyone to download it and print it out. It’s estimated 300,000 stickers and 500,000 posters were distributed in the early part of the campaign. The idea of Obama had found its logo.

Now, as real life invades the dream, the day job of the presidency has made Obama human again. The voters of Massachusetts are like buyers of Apple products who find that when they got it home the new tablet computer hasn’t turned them into cool creative underground hipsters like they promised it would. The reality of the brand can be found by spending an hour on one of the many IT support forums, trying to find a solution to why the battery has caught fire, or the hard disk has crashed for the second time in a year.

The other problem for Obama as tech brand is that product life cycles are getting shorter and shorter as our desire for the new intensifies. What next? Two-year electoral cycles? The campaign was so much more fun after all.

More than ever before, we put enormous faith in ideas, living our lives in a state of almost constant anticipation of what the next thing will deliver. This is Obama’s greatest dilemma: he is president of a country that has become addicted to innovation.