Did Social Networking Propel Barack Obama to the Democratic Nomination?

By Ben Haber

August 29th, 2008

By Ben Haber

As Barack Obama accepted the democratic nomination for president last night, other candidates were left wondering how this young, lesser-known candidate leaped above them and secured all of those votes.

Well, the answer might be social networking.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “Obama and his staff relied on a social-networking site, www.my.barackobama.com, to help supporters find one another and to disperse the campaign’s messages to a broad audience. Most campaigns had access to the same technology and didn’t have anywhere near the online-success of Obama.”

Obama’s online success should come as a surprise to anyone, as his Facebook page alone has almost 1.5 million supporters. Obama has also leveraged mobile media, as he announced his vice president via text message. In fact, Obama has a presence on almost every social networking site including Twitter (where he has over 68,000 followers), YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, and Digg.

Then through Obama’s home page, he has his own separate social networking site for his supporters, where people can get together and discuss issues, events, and other topics. If that doesn’t appear to someone, then they can turn to his blog, where there is a plethora of information about the campaign.

With this type of groundwork (which is so easy to do from a computer) it’s no wonder that he has so many young supporters, and may be on his way to the White House in 2009.

Entry Filed under: Facebook, Social Media, Twitter