President Obama – How He Used Social Media To Win His Election

admin    Social Media     Election, Media, Obama, President, Social, Used

We all know how historic the 2008 US Elections have been, President Barack Obama has a lot of ‘first’ in history now, one of them being the 1st presidential candidate who owes a big portion of his ‘thanks for helping me win’ to the Internet!

Social Media Networking played a massive role in Obama’s campaign, he has MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, his website and even an SMS opt in. What are the factors that made all the difference for Obama’s campaign? It wasn’t anything new, they didn’t invent anything special, rather they combined different social networking applications that had a huge impact on people all over the net and they managed to raise money, organize locally for different states, they had more power in fighting smear campaigns and eventually gain the vote of the people.

Lets compare some numbers starting with blogs. Mc Cain had about 150 million mentions in blogs, President Obama had close to 500 million! That’s a huge difference. President Obama has close to a million friends and got 10,000 more around Election Day. McCain has a little over 200,000 friends and gained 964 more on Election Day. Obama is also leading in twitter with about 12,000 followers while McCain didn’t reach 5000. Then we have YouTube with 134,000 Obama followers and more than 3 million on Facebook!

Thomas Jefferson used newspapers to help him earn his seat, John F. Kennedy used TV, and Howard Dean used the web for raising money, President Obama on the other hand took the web and used it to lower the cost of building a political brand and with it get closer to more people. This is a day and age where people’s identities are hooked online and that’s simply a fact. How many people can you count that you know who doesn’t have a PC, a laptop, a blueberry or a cellular phone? People want to be informed now and President Obama can get to them.

So all this Social Media networking was more on campaigning and viral marketing, what’s going to happen now that he’s president? For starters, it will now cost the white house close to $0 to get in touch with millions of Americans via all the different means they have used during the campaign. Now, President Obama has millions of names and email addresses of supporters all over the country and it doesn’t stop here, hello supporters do you smell the 2012 elections?

Twitter the Election – is There a Twitter Expansion on the Horizon?

admin    Twitter     Election, Expansion, Horizon, There, Twitter

As Democratic Sen. Joe Biden and Republican Gov. Sarah Palin prepare to square off tonight in the first Vice Presidential debate, I need to step back to a moment last week and talk about something Twitter launched for the election – that has the social media world stirring in its belly.

For the presidential debate last week, Twitter launched a niche application site called Twitter E08 that focused directly on the presidential election campaign in the United States. The website worked by simply filtering twitter messages (tweets) from all users by certain keywords and aggregating these messages into one page.

In addition, a user can go directly to the section on the website and send a message directly, and it is seen in the twitter timeline immediately. I love the idea of this, as does the community – if you head to the election page – you see it is constantly updating – the interaction is priceless, or useless…depending who you ask.

By promoting the election – Twitter has finally begun to think about ‘micro’ sites within Twitter that will not only aggregate conversations, but build out ‘channels’ per-say of different topics, sports, fashion, marketing, schools, and dare I say ‘business’?

Let’s walk into one of those channels, oh, look, a big transition ad for the NFL.  Oh look, now were in the football channel – with 543 other people talking about football. You see my point. I am not against this at all.  I am actually 100% for it.  I am sure Twitter is tired of hearing criticism surrounding their business model and how they generate money.  I think this election is the starting point for something ‘big’ twitter is considering doing.  Twitter is run by a group of 20 people, that’s it!  I am sure their partner channels and VC funds are well stocked, but naturally you think ‘bigger’ and growth.

I know we would hear endless people complain about a new layout, if the site were to take on niche groups and starts with ads galore; but I think only the current twitter use would complain. Look at the people who now wish to ban the new Facebook layout – because they are too lazy to see their precious applications are on the bottom toolbar – in static mode. Facebook was tired of seeing user pages that would just go down for miles with comments, applications, etc…this opened the door to keep everything within the “user’s level” – instead of having to scroll down 30 seconds to see what someone said about somebody else (you know you care about that!)

Either way, this election and what Twitter is ‘experimenting’ with is just the beginning of a new style Twitter will be undergoing. You know it. I know it.  We all know it.

Go Twitter!