“Tweets from the President are signed -BO”. Notes on Barack Obama’s web campaigning

The next United States presidential election is to be held on Tuesday, November 6, 2012.
February 2012: Barack Obama’s use of the web as a campaigning tool is now gearing up.

His campaign staff must be among the most web-literate ever.
Joe Rospars is chief digital strategist and Michael Slaby is chief integration and innovation officer.

Notes on how Obama’s team are using the web to campaign.

I’ll expand on these notes, when I have time, in the next few months:

Video

‘The Story of Us: Five Years Ago Today’.
It’s a web video referencing web videos, that’s designed to lead you to share it (on the web) or donate (on the web). Cleverly done.

It’s stuck at 303 views now, 10th Feb 2012. How high will it go?

At 0:12 in the video, Obama is pictured public speaking. The sign on the podium reads BarackObama.com. See what they did there? All joined up.

Video stats
Most popular of his vids is at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsWpvkLCvu4 – 11,835,239 views for dancing.

10th Feb 2012: Channel contains 2,073 vids. First upload in approx. 2007.
10th Feb 2012: Channel Views: 25,022,003
10th Feb 2012: Total Upload Views: 170,540,218

BarackObama.com website

A modern-looking, well laid out site. Blog based, with a page for every state. Looks like jQuery / Ajax rather than Flash for animations. All videos are embedded from YouTube, and so are easily shareable. The blog does have a lot of dissenting comments. I wonder how many people are moderating the blog for trolls etc?
Site answers most of the main questions that voters ask.

Twitter: @BarackObama

Profile says: “Tweets from the President are signed -BO.” Translation: The President of the USA is aware that this Twitter account exists and is an active participant, even though he’s very busy etc.

Twitter stats
10th Feb 2012: Currently 12,423,178 followers.

facebook.com/barackobama

Has light moderation. Dissenting, negative comments allowed.
Negative comments make many senior execs break out in hives. But on Facebook, they can be a good thing if you want your message to spread.
Why? Because conflict is drama. And Facebook has a drama algorithm. It’s called Edgerank and uses three factors:
Affinity (friendliness), edge weight (content type) and recency (age of edge). In essence, a lively Facebook page with dissenting comments causes Obama supporters to comment more often, which causes Obama’s Facebook page to pop up more often in news feeds. The more appearances he makes in your new feeds, the more likely it is that you’ll check his page out. If you then engage with the page, Obama’s Facebook page is then spread even more widely… see network theories.

Facebook stats
10th Feb 2012: 25,110,910 likes.

http://barackobama.tumblr.com/

And for the younger folks, there’s even a Tumblr account. With animated gifs.
Did you know that Tumblr is supposed to be the UK’s second most popular social network or blog, “with 229.6 million page views, trailing only Facebook.”?