Internet: Obama's Social Media Advantage
In the course of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign which resulted in the election of Senator Barack Obama, noted effectively was his exceptional use of online social media to gain supporters and votes.
A clear and clever advantage for him, nobody had seen anything like it before nor experienced a runner for such a high profile utilise the new social communications media in this way. Though election rival John McCain jumped on the social media bandwagon too, he never managed to create as much a stir as Obama did in the form of blogs and on the social networks Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Close to 500 million blog postings mentioned him over the course of
the conventions. During the same time period, only
about 150 million blog posts mentioned McCain. On MySpace, Obama held a clear lead, with 844,927 friends compared to McCain's 219,404. On Twitter, Obama gained a total of 118,107 new
followers, while John
McCain's Twitter account only had a paltry 4942 followers in total.
According to many analysts and speculators at the time, Obama not only won due to his use of these media tools to connect to his followers, he progressed quickly because he also organised his campaigns through it. There are, of course, many reasons why Barack Obama's campaign
gained more traction on social networks and blogs than McCain's
campaign. The demographics
of social media users tend to fall in line more closely with those of
today's demographic voters, for example.
What does this mean for the 2012 U.S. campaign
cycle? It seems clear that all political crusades, especially at this
level, will start ignoring social media trends at their own peril. Obama will have to up his game
to top the polls again. What does it mean for political campaigns worldwide? Will government elections be based on real issues and fair campaigning? Or is the priority now simply going to be a social online media race to influence quickly and build numbers no matter the real issues?