pr-media-blog.co.uk

The United States presidential election has been the first major democratic process anywhere in the world where the use of social media has played a significant part in communications.

Of the eighteen candidates running in the primaries for the two main parties, nine had blogs, including both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.   Involvement in social networks was significant from the earliest days. Republican Mitt Romney was the first prospective candidate to launch a Facebook profile,  Democrat John Edwards set up a campaign headquarters in the cyber world of Second Life.  This resulted in a bizarre web 2.0 event when it was vandalised by the avatars of his political opponents.  Clinton used her web site to launch her campaign.

It was Barack Obama though who was the prime mover from the outset.  He engaged with most of the high profile social networking sites including MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter.  On the day that Barack Obama announced he was forming a presidential exploratory committee in January 2007, student government co-ordinator Farouk Olu Aregbe created a group on Facebook called “One Million Strong for Barack”.  The social web was critical to the Obama campaign in another fundamental way.  It played an important part in the funding of his bid for office.  In a campaign video directed at his supporters he said “Instead of forcing us to rely on millions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs, you’ve fuelled this campaign with donations of $5, $10, $20, whatever you can afford, and because you did, we’ve built a grassroots movement of over 1.5 million Americans.”  Obama’s success raising money via these small donations was achieved in a way never before possible as part of a U.S. presidential election campaign.

The 1960 election of John F Kennedy was thought to be point at which television became central to the democratic process.  2008 may well be the year that sees the critical intervention of the social web

Have just taken a first proper look at Politics & The City the website created and newly launched by June Sarpong (best known for presenting Channel 4’s T4). In case you can’t tell it’s aimed at women, with the hope of making politics a bigger topic of discussion than perhaps it currently is amongst the fairer sex. Coupled with other, slightly lighter content, I guess it’s a one stop shop for the noughties woman and, on first glance, the website itself is well designed and easy to navigate and I think the concept generally is a good one.

The only gripe I have is whether it’s absolutely necessary to couple stories on Westminster and the global political stage with stories on David Beckham collecting another teen award; whether Obama should give his daughters a new puppy or a rescue dog (and asking viewers of the site to vote on it) and the best of this season’s LBDs as seen on the backs of the A-listers.

I’m not suggesting that it’s not possible for women to like one and not the other but I also wonder whether the website wouldn’t be just as affective and impressive if its sole focus was the political arena (and the personalities within it) and it left itself open as a forum for women’s views and opinions. There are tonnes of other female-focused websites, magazines and newspapers that dish the dirt on all the other stuff that strikes a chord with women, so why not leave that out of Politics & The City?

Anyway, will be interesting to see how it developes and evolves and discover which breed of dog - hypoallergenic, rescue or otherwise - Barack finally plumps for if things go his way in November.