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?

Oprah Not Following Obama On Twitter

admin    Twitter     Following, Obama, Oprah, Twitter

I was very relunctent to start Twitter. Don’t I already have enough in my life with myspace, facebook, and Youtube. Thats what I thought to myself. However, I heard a lot of celebritities were on Twitter saying interesting comments. So I decided I had better see what all the commotion was all about. The first thing I did when I got to Twitter was find the celebrity pages. I went to Oprah’s page first. I noticed that since joining Twitter Oprah has followed notable celebrities like Shaq, Hugh Jackson, and the Kutchers. However, there is one noteworthy person that she is not following. She is not following Barack Obama. Most would think that her first following would have been with Obama. After all Oprah is his number one fan. She pulled out all the stops to get him elected. Winfrey first endorsed Obama before he was even a candidate in September 2006. She made campaign appearances, and rallied behind Obama. So why is she not interested in Obama on Twitter?

There are two major Barack Obama sites on Twitter. The most followed is Barack Obama with over one million followers. The other is Obama News with around 99,000 followers. Moreover, Oprah has really gotten involved with Twitter. There are two main Oprah sites on Twitter. Her main Twitter site were she tweets. She started tweeting on April 17th and has already obtained over 800,000 followers. Next in line is O Magazine with over 45,000 followers. The best unofficial site is witter.com/Oprah_Giveaways.

There are a couple of reasons I think that she does not follow Obama. First, Obama has not tweeted much since the campaign has been over. After the Inauguration there have only been 4 tweets. Obama’a tweets are very impersonal. They look like press releases. It would be nice if he actually tweeted on how he is doing. After all that’s the slogan of Twitter . There have been a lot of Tweets on Obama News. However, the tweets on Obama News are not put out by Obama himself.

One a side not I noticed that Oprah is not following O Magazine. Maybe she does not read the magazine either. Anyway, there have been other famous non followings. Palin who at first did not follow John McCain. However, not long after the “non following” was blogged about she was following McCain. I’m sure as soon as this gets out it will only take a few seconds before Oprah is following Obama. Or perhaps she has abandoned Obama for Shaq Diesel 2012.