Obama’s Social Media Push Sets a President

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By: Matt Clark

Its official. Barack Obama is the champion of political social marketing. His camp has conquered the social graph and the digital frontier. Use any Web 2.0 word you want, and Obama’s the best at it.

Yesterday, his camp said that Barack Obama will announce his running make via e-mail and text messages. I first saw the notice in my Facebook updates. The message was simple, “Barack Obama is about to make one of the most important decisions of this campaign – choosing a…” Obviously I read on, signed up immediately, and then was happily hustled into a $20 donation.

Barack’s social media and digital marketing campaign’s seem to be picking up speed. With over 1.2 million Facebook supporters, Obama is unifying the mass of young voters – something that has escaped politicians in the past. This is not because he’s hip, young cool, or a “celeb.” It’s because the Obama team knows their audience. It’s no longer about saying the right thing, but saying it in a way people want to hear it. Our grandparents want to hear what he has to say on TV and our parents want to read in the newspaper. But our generation wants it over the web, and not from online news sites, but via MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, text messages, ect… If you were trying to reach 12-16 year old boys with a new video game, would you really pitch the Wall Street Journal? (If you said yes please punch yourself and find a new job).

The GOP has had to jump on their mud machine to try and slow down Obama’s internet push. The GOP launched BarackBook, a lookalike of Obama’s Facebook presence that mocks the Obama’s web appeal and calls him out on certain issues. The site also links to Meet Barack Obama, which seems to be nothing more but pure mudslinging, with a sleek web 2.0 look. But they are all on separate Web sites with no core popular network behind them, so they get no traffic. Why try to build a consumer base when networking sites have already done it for you? If this is how McCain’s top strategist think, I’m sure McCain can’t even Google.

Obama blogs, has a Facebook page, a MySpace page, is all over YouTube (in a good way), has his own social network, a widget, tweets, has a mobile page and mobile content and a podcast… (wow I’m out of breath). As my man D says, “big ups” to Joe Rospars, Obama’s top web strategist.

The question that everyone wants to know, is will this help bring out young people to the polls? I don’t think Obama can rely on younger voters to carry him this November, but it may give him an edge. And if it does make a big impact in the numbers (I’m going to say it will), you will see every Fortune 500 company and major politician dump tons of money in the field.