Barack Obama Uses the Power of Social Media Noticed by Mainstream Media

There’s an interesting article on Business Week today written by CEO of online reputation management company Rapleaf detailing the history of presidential candidates using various cutting-edge technologies of their respective ages to target voters better - from radio to television and cable ad networks. Now that we live in the 2.0 world there’s definitely tons of new tools to use to reach electorate in a more intimate and human manner - and these tools are heavily used by Barack Obama.

This article actually introduces the notion of the third “ask” by the candidate: while traditionally a candidate only asks supporters for votes and money, Obama campaign introduced a new “ask” - the one for support where you can actually help with as little time/money/resources as you may have. And this third “ask” relies on social media as heavily as it relies on supporters knocking on doors or calling people on the phone.

This new approach is based on the idea that even if a supporter does not have time to knock on the doors or money to contribute, he or she may still want to give a few moments of their time to help the candidate in other ways. One of such ways mentioned is to give a vote on Digg to a story favorable to Obama or negative to John McCain. Something tells me that soliciting votes can be viewed as violating Digg ToS but I don’t think there are top stories on the front page of Digg without at least some number of solicited votes in addition to natural ones.

So if a news article favorable to Barack Obama gets submitted to Digg (also by Obama supporters, I believe) some of the supporters of the Democratic Party may receive requests to vote the article up in order to get extra visibility and attention. I have done a quick search on Digg and it seems to me that Obama’s supporters are very efficient on the social news site with making the favorable content noticed with many stories having over 2 thousand votes on them and hundreds of comments. What’s more, they seem to even find a bypass for a general Digg rule of not voting for an article on the same topic twice - in the recent example three stories about Obama naming Joe Biden as Vice President from different sources made it to the front page almost at the same time (there was actually the fourth one also but it was quickly buried after making it to the front page).

A similar search for “McCain” showed that he seemed to have much less supporters on Digg because quite a number of the front page stories mentioning this presidential candidate was actually criticizing him and his platform. I believe the Republicans simply have not had time to learn how to solicit votes up (and down as well) on Digg.

Another way to show your support to Barack Obama is by putting an appropriate widget to help the world get the news about the candidate you support from your blog or your profile on a social network. When I need information on this or that widget I usually go to Widgetbox to get a sense of how active people are in installing certain widgets on their blog or profiles so I have decided to take a look if I can find some campaign-related widgets. These widgets are actually numerous - there was a total of 100 widgets with “Obama” in their descriptions. And while the most popular widget (with almost 7 thousand installations) showed candidates playing paintball for presidency, some of those that seemed to be the official ones (submitted by the user Obama for America) also had over 4 thousand installations which is not a small number of people showing their support by actually bothering to grab some piece of code and install it somewhere.

At the same time while there is a comparable number of widgets in the repository for John McCain as well, the majority of them seem to criticize the candidate and I have not seen any “official” widgets on the site either. The most popular pro-McCain widget, Blogs for John McCain, only received 224 installs from users - quite a big difference when compared to Obama’s achievements.

Another place where I wanted to compare social media activity of both candidates and their supporters was Facebook. Here the results were not even surprising any more as they only confirmed the trend. The official “Obama for America” Facebook application receives over 35 thousand monthly active users (and Facebook actually features 159 applications related to Barack Obama) while John McCain’s Yardsign for Facebook only receives a little over 7 thousand active monthly users (this one is the most popular of only 37 McCain-related applications on Facebook).

Also both candidates have pages on Facebook that any Facebook user can declare him/herself a fan of. Barack Obama camp offers a selection of 153 pages to supporters with the most popular official one having almost 1,400 thousand fans. At the same time John McCain can only be supported on 30 pages with the most popular one only having a little over 200 thousand fans.

This could tell something about Facebook demographics or the general demographics of social media users but I believe it also demonstrates that social media can really be a powerful tool when handled properly. After all, Obama supporters really can easier get access to relevant widgets and pages to show their support - and those widgets will be the official ones created and distributed based on some kind of an online strategy. Chances are if McCain supporters were offered an opportunity to easier show their support, they could have used that opportunity better as well. Unfortunately what they can do now is create and distribute the tools to show support themselves without much of centralized support.

I believe this campaign leveraging the power of social tools will teach all the future candidates that there are tons of techniques online that can be used efficiently to both deliver the message and engage voters in distributing this message out of their own free will. So same as we see wars migrating to the cyber space these days we will inevitably see election campaigns moving online to a larger extent as well in the future.