A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how social media will make the world a better place . The past Tuesday, I think that this point was proven to the world as a junior senator from Illinois was elected the President of the United States.
Muchhasbeen written about the way that, over the past 2 years the Obama campaign, has leveraged everything from YouTube to Facebook to MySpace to Flickr to Twitter in order to convey a consistent message and increasingly gather support for his bid for President. By the end of September, while the McCain camapaign seemed to be making a presence in these new fangled interweb thingies, the Obama campagin was moving full throttle, like Katamari Damacy , gathering up more and more supporters, $5 at a time, with a message of hope and change.
In the end, Obama had out raised McCain by over 2 times. But more importantly than the money raised was the way that Obama reached out so frequently and was so transparent and so consistent with his message. When I look at the stats of their respective social media sites, it is clear that Obama was far ahead in having a medium that allowed him to communicate asynchronously with his supporters.
Unlike politics over the past 12,000 years, another unique component of the Obama campaign was the level of transparency and the interest in reaching out to get the opinion of his constituents never before seen. Obama and staff sent out regular missives, sometimes to the point of being spammy, to all willing to receive them. These messages were fairly consistent - this is where I will be, this is what we are working on, this is why, please make a donation. After 8 years of secrecy, this is just another one of things that Obama recognized that people wanted, a level of transparency in their government. Sounds simple doesn't it?
The past 4 days, since Obama's election have been no less interesting in terms of the usage of social media. The day immediately following the election, the Obama administration (that sounds great) launched Change.gov , a site maintaining that level of transparency. The site keeps all of the public up to speed with what is going on with the administration and has even asked the public for ideas and job applicants. Of course, all of this information has been available on some hard to navigate site. What Change.gov does is make it easy to find and easy to communicate.
This past week also saw a lot of Al Gore . He supposedly signed up for Twitter . He was on DiggDialog and make the closing talk at the Web 2.0 Summit . All amazing stuff.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I believe that people want to do what is best for the community and do what is best for the environment. The election of Barack Obama shows that social media can really work to make a tremendous change. We now have the soon to be President of the US that fully embraces social media as well as the person most outspoken for climate change both building armies of people willing to listen, spread and modify their lives based on their message.
It is a great time to be alive and to be part of this happening.
