US President 2.0
November 2nd, 2008 by Rob Brown
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
Tags: , Barack, barack obama, Facebook, Farouk Olu Aregbe, JFK, John F Kennedy, McCain, MySpace, obama, President 2.0, Second Life, Social Web, Web 2.0
November 3rd, 2008 at 9:25 am
and here’s an email recieved by Obama’s volunteers last night - really innovative way of using Facebook
Dear friends,
Tuesday is the most important election of our lifetimes. Let’s make sure everyone on Facebook gets to the polls on election day by making sure our friends do, and that their friends do, and their friends, and their friends…you get the idea.
Donate your Facebook status and at 12:01am, your friends will automatically be reminded to get to the polls. Everyone’s Facebook status message will be the same and we will flood the site with a huge, consolidated message to go vote. Millions of people will come together to make a difference in this election.
I’m so pumped about this - there are over 100 million people on Facebook, this could make a real difference!
Donate your Facebook status today.
http://apps.facebook.com/causes/election?m=f6dd9789&recruiter_id=221776
November 3rd, 2008 at 12:23 pm
the power of the interwebs.
November 3rd, 2008 at 3:08 pm
The No on Prop 8 campaign in California also has used Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, YouTube, etc - reaching 129,000 supporters on facebook, leveraging ads made by supporters on YouTube, and posting information about rallies on Twitter. They have a page on their web site with a list of how to engage in their campaign online (www.noonprop8.com) and have pulled in out of state support (similar to their opponent’s campaign though their opponent doesn’t leverage social media with as much impact)