The Methods and Implications of the Obama Campaign’s use of Social Networking Tools
With the many social networking resources we have today, it is easy to see how the United States president Barack Obama was able to win a landslide victory against John McCain in the 2008 election. Obama made a very wise decision to tap into the social media network and use it as an advantage in running for president. A great percentage of the success of his campaign came from the usage of social media sites such as facebook, youtube,myspace and especially twitter.
Obama's official website is BarackObama.com. It is cleverly run by Chris Hughes, who is one of the three co-founders of Facebook.This website was a very smart decision made by the Obama party because the website is structured to mimic a social media site. On BarackObama.com, the site includes online tools that allows for its members to create blogs, post photos, and form groups. This became a major aid to Obama. As reported by Hughes the website generated over 200 million new users who took to the site to organize their local communities on behalf of Barack Obama. He also estimated that over 200,000 events were organized and 400,000 articles written.
Obama and Facebook
A few months before the election, the Obama administration created an interconnection between the user accounts on www.barackobama.com and Facebook. As Obama expanded his use of facebook, he was also able to attract younger voters and more of the minority vote. The Obama Presidential Campaign spent 643,000 promoting Obama's facebook page. This page also attracted voters to keep track of the election and stay in tune with the current events in relation to the election.
I agree with you, I also think that Barack Obama’s campaign organized communities, getting volunteers through myBarackObama.com and raising funds from supporters. His campaign was on YouTube, MySpace, Twitter , Facebook and others to allow his voters to keep track of the current events related with the elections. I think that Obama’s campaign was an easy strategy that used technology to attract minorities and younger voters, making issues personal as well as relevant because it gave people ownership of the campaign by allowing them to be part of it.
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