Obama, Social Media, and the 2008 Campaign
I will begin my first blog series as a look into the utilization of social media in general, and Twitter specifically, in both the Obama campaign and Presidency, & it's Conservative opposition.
There is no argument to be made; the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama has forever changed the way that technology is used in political campaigns. It has left such a solid impact that there is even a business plan called "Barack 2.0" that claims to teach you "Barack Obama's Social Media Lessons for Business" http://barack20.com/ The campaign used facebook, MySpace, Twitter, text messaging, blog postings, and a very detailed interactive website to mobilize and organize an astounding win in both popular & electoral votes.
Now don't get me wrong. Mccain's campaign was using these strategies too. But they were playing catchup, due in part to Obamas early start, and because Obama skewed much higher with younger voters, while Mccain skewed higher with older voters. And as we know, younger people tend to be earlier adopters of new technology (no offense).
"On social networks, Obama also held a clear lead, with 844,927 MySpace friends compared to McCain's 219,404. Just between November 3rd and November 4th (election day), Obama gained over 10,000 new friends, while McCain only gained about 964. On Twitter, Obama gained 2865 new followers between the 3rd and 4th (for a total of 118,107), while John McCain's Twitter account only has a paltry 4942 followers in total."--- http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/social_media_obama_mccain_comparison.php
So, we know how successful that turned out and what it accomplished so far. Lets take a look at how active Obama's organizational arm still is on social media. Obama is still active on Twitter (or at least a handler is), as is the White House and The West Wing. This popularity has continued to rise (this is not to be taking as accurate polling on popularity or agenda), in fact with followers on Twitter rising 20% in just a few weeks from 44,000 to 53,000. (http://barack20.com/index.php/?p=9 Aug 5th). Obama's twitter account currently has 2,194,908 as of this posting. Quite impressive by any ones standards. But then again. Obamas not just breaking standards, he's setting them.
So, it is apparent then, that as far as a social media campaign goes, Obama's gains turned into popular and electoral wins on Nov. 4th, and his organizational arm are continuing to operate a heavily organized social media campaign to disseminate information and help organize his base to continue pushing his agenda among them. These are the technological aspects to what Conservatives are currently labeling 'Alinsky' style organizational methods. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Alinsky
Now what about the Conservatives?
Conservatives are not strangers to social media, and although no candidate or movement has yet entirely adopted the Obama social media strategy, it's safe to say they are on SM. One of the most popular conservatives to demonstrate this is Sarah Palin. Not only does she update a facebook page on a regular basis, but up until she stepped down from her Governer's seat she was very active on Twitter as well on @AKGovSarahPalin (if Palin has started an individual Twitter account let me know), and has been extremely popular on both. Even though her twitter account is inactive she's now up to 144781 followers.
More on conservatives on and conservative reaction to social media in the next installment. I look forward to any feed back you might have for me and any leads to ease my journey.
---Justin Wright
Angled Television
9-20-2009
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