Social networking is not exactly new to politics but as the web has evolved so have the strategies and tactics of political campaign teams and the online profiles of politicians. One thing that has struck me as very interesting throughout the U.S. presidential campaign this year was the overall design factor behind each candidate’s brand, graphic identity and website. A topic that I will be looking at in greater detail in a later post but for now I want to focus on the way in which Obama in particular has utilised the web and social media to promote his campaign.

Obama is everywhere. He was the first candidate to start using widgets to make it easy for anyone to donate to the campaign through his social media tools and networking sites (see the screenshot above).  He was the first candidate to have a LinkedIn group and the first candidate with a profile on BlackPlanet.com, MiGente.com and GLEE.com. You can connect with Obama on all of the usual suspects too, of course -  Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter. The Washington Post have called Obama the “King of Social Networking”, the New York Times have labelled him the first “wiki-candidate”, there is even an official Obama iPhone application and a website, Barack 2.0, dedicated to analysing the Obama campaign’s use of social media from a small business perspective.

In previous political campaigns the online strategy seemed to be to get as many visitors to a candidates website as possible, a strategy not limited to politics, however, as many sites took a tunnel-vision approach to website hits. Since the web is a much busier, interactive, diverse, on-demand and collaborative world now, and while these social networking sites are still somewhat in their infancy, their value in reaching and engaging with people is another important performance metric. Not only does Obama’s web strategy reach people though, it calls them to action. All of Obama’s networking tools serve as extensions of interaction and user involvement centered around a clear call to action – get involved, volunteer and/ or donate.

I wasn’t expecting to receive an e-mail like the above.

And I was not expecting to be a 2nd LinkedIn connection to Obama either. But the question remains, regardless of the means what will the outcome be? Could the wiki-candidate be a wiki-President? We will find out very soon.

To be continued…

- Niamh