Barack Obama on Youtube, Myspace and Facebook

The 2008 United States presidential elections were a big highlight worldwide in the year 2008, with Senator Barack Obama securing a big win to be elected as the new President of the United States.

Social media sites such as MySpace, YouTube and Facebook were unknown in the previous election, played an important part in this year’s presidential elections. Barack Obama used these social networking sites to reach out to different demographic groups (AustralianIT, 2008).

Video Link: Social Media's Big Win - Australian IT, 2008

“These websites help politicians connect more directly with their voters,” – Google CEO Eric Schmidt (McCullagh, 2008 - CNET News)

After the end of the campaign, Barack Obama now has over 850,000 friends on MySpace. People were able to view videos, post comments, and have discussions. Here is a link to Barack Obama’s MySpace profile.

Barack Obama - MySpace Profile

On Facebook, users posted their voting status for the campaign, whether they were in or out to vote for a candidate. Supporters used sites to influence their peers, creating a peer pressure situation (AustralianIT, 2008). Many groups, applications and networks were created by supporters for Obama. Obama’s Facebook friend count is over 1 million.

The public now have the power to control the message they want to see, especially on the web. According to Nielsen (1997), the internet is about interaction and maximizing user initiative and empowerment.

Barack Obama on Facebook

YouTube is video networking service where users are able to post videos of their choice. Barack Obama made good use of this service, posting video after video, amounting to over 1800 videos, and over 19 million channel views (YouTube.com, 2008). Obama’s director of field video production Arun Chaudhary said that his organization took video seriously from the start (Learmonth, 2008 – Silicon Alley Insider).

Barack Obama - YouTube channel

If it were not for the internet, Barack Obama might not be president, or a nominee from the democrats. Through this, future candidates would be sure not to ignore the use of the internet for their campaigns.

A possible reason to why McCain lost: McCain Advisor: We Don’t Need Facebook, They’re Not Our Voters

----------

References

Learmonth, M 2008, ‘Obama’s Video Guru Speaks: How We Owned The YouTube Primary’, Silicon Alley Insider, viewed 10 November 2008, <http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/7/obama-s-video-guru-speaks-how-we-owned-the-youtube-primary>.

Leberecht, T 2008, ‘Obama video: a new way for new media’, CNET News, viewed 10 November 2008, <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13641_3-10000365-44.html?tag=mncol>.

Needleman, R 2008, ‘The Obama presidency: ‘It’s the network, stupid’’, CNET News, viewed 10 November 2008, <http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10086354-2.html?tag=mncol>.

Nielsen, J 1997, TV Meets the Web, Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, Useit.com, viewed 10 November 2008, <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9702b.html>.

McCullagh, D 2008, ‘Google CEO: Internet spurred Obama’s nomination’, CNET News, viewed 10 November 2008, <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10028349-38.html?tag=mncol>.

The Australian IT, Social Media’s Big Win 2008, video recording, viewed 10 November 2008, <http://player.video.news.com.au/australianit/#rd5lzrO6AdGzPmb_vfyTigTZ_Z7molgl>.