Social Media

President 2.0 – How Social Media will define Barack Obama’s Presidency

The victory of US President –elect Barack Obama was ground-breaking in more ways than one.  Finally, after more than 200 years of history, the United States of America elected Obama as their first African-American president last November 4, 2008.

Campaigning under the slogan “Change We Must Believe In”, Obama in reality brought change on his way to the highest office in the US.  Leveraging the Internet, President-elect Obama used social media’s connecting, collaborating and communicating properties to connect with his followers, collaborate with volunteers and communicate his message to as many voters as possible, moving from click-of-mouth to word-of-mouth.  I blogged about it before (Building Communities – Barack Obama and Politics 2.0) and recently, the New York Times blog, Bits, elaborated more on how Obama’s Internet campaign changed politics.

In the post “Barack Obama The First Social Media President?” at the SearchMarketingGurus.com, you can see Barack Obama had everything covered in his social media strategy – http://my.barackobama.com for enlisting volunteers, a blog, a Flickr account, a YouTube channel, a LinkedIn account, a Twitter account, and of course, other accounts in different social networking sites.  He was even in Yahoo! Answers where he asked the community, “How can we engage more people in the democratic process?” The question received more than 17,000 answers (click on the link to see who got the best answer).

With President-elect Barack Obama appointing soon a national CTO for the US, indeed he may very well be the first Social Media President.  What we saw during his campaigning will just be a tip of the iceberg with what’s in store in his presidency.  It will be interesting to see social media will be used in governance.  Imagine how many Americans will be informed and involved in policy-making once social media is used to discuss and develop them.  This is definitely something to look forward to.

In the home front, I won’t be surprised if our very own “Presidentiables” in the coming 2010 national elections here in the Philippines will start to leverage what Obama has successfully accomplished (Hmm, I remember reading about Senator Mar Roxas meeting some bloggers a few months ago).  In the previous Senatorial elections, we saw candidates launching websites, participating in podcasts and chatting with users online.  Watch out for more online activity because next time, they will be blogging, twitting, plurking, putting up a Friendster or Multiply or Facebook account, asking questions in Yahoo! Answers and uploading their pictures in Flickr and videos in YouTube.  Change has indeed come to politics, and we have social media to thank for.

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© 2008 Twikinomics by Jonas de los Reyes.