Social Networking gets political

Tech Joy

Joy commented on Obama's use of Web 2.0 tools to bolster his campaign efforts, and I feel the need to reiterate how impressed I was at his campaign's abililty to integrate Facebook and other social networking sites into his campaign. On election eve, I was fascainted by the wave of facebook status updates pertaining to the election. Early Monday afternoon I started seeing status updates along the lines of "John Smith is the 1,173,585th person to donate their status to get out the vote for Barack Obama today. Donate yours: http://causes.com/election".

When I first started noticing these updates, people were in the 500,000's in terms of numbers who donated their status. Within a few hours or so the numbers were above 1.5 million. The speed at which that status spread was just incredible - and ingenious on the part of the Obama social networking team. The Obama facebook application, which allows you to see which of your friends are Obama supporters, view short campaign videos, and spread the campaign messages, is just one online tool votes can take advantage of. Others include an iPhone app and the Barak Obama social networking website that Joy mentions. By the time McCain launched a facebook app, Obama already had signed up a million "friends".

There are many articles and blog posts on the way in which the Obama campaign has utilized Web 2.0 tools to advance its goals, but for me, nothing was as powerful a demonstration as the "donate your status" campaign that swept through my facebook friends!