Social Networking in Obama's 2008 Campaign

     Perhaps the one of the main reasons Barack Obama was elected was because his campaign was able to not only use the internet to gain support, but the Obama campaign also provided the tools to allow their supports to contribute to the cause as well. Traditionally, it would be mostly the job of campaign committee to organize events and recruit supporters towards the candidate. However, with the ever increasing usage of the social media, now it is easier than ever to successfully gain broader attention and attain supporters without wasting too much effort.

     As mentioned in the article, the Obama campaign set up a social networking site called www.my.barackobama.com. This site was set up to allow users to create an account and contribute to the campaign by giving them the tools to allow them to organize events. The website provided the tools for users to round up volunteers within their communities to get together and plan events. The website provided contact details of all the users, making it easy to communicate with each other.

     Perhaps was made it very successful was the fact that the people themselves were able to navigate the site without so much difficulty. You can only do so much on a site if the website itself doesn’t work. People tend to get discouraged quite easily if the site is lagging or showing error messages too often. The article mentions for example that McCain also had a social networking site, but it was rather ineffective because users had too much trouble navigating the site. The site has to be maintained and updated regularly if you are to keep people visiting your site.

     In addition, people nowadays are constantly using social networking sites in their daily lives. People post on Facebook, tweets and blog everyday and millions of people around the world are able to see it. To have an online presence can give you a very good advantage in being recognizable and also to effectively make you message known to wider audiences.