Poke the next President

We are roughly one year away from electing our 44^th president of the United States, but this won’t be like your father’s presidential election. Gone are the days of going door to door and instead candidates are sending out friend requests. Instead of wearing jeans to prove they are normal, they are setting up online profiles to show how hip they are.

Welcome to politics in the Web 2.0 era!

In a recent study, Laura Gordon-Murnane examines each candidate’s presence on the Internet and also breaks down the effect of the Internet on traditional outlets, like debates.

When examining the top two social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook, candidates use each web site’s tools to better market their candidacy. For our purposes, I examined Barack Obama, who has accounts on both MySpace and Facebook.

On his Facebook account, Obama has links to groups that support his candidacy, as well as links to articles and videos of his presidential run thus far.

On his MySpace page, the content is somewhat similar, but it is a little more casual than his Facebook page. On MySpace, Obama had an embedded video of him on Saturday Night Live, but it is no longer available.

Also, he has a feature where you can demand Obama comes to your city to speak with a continuous tally of how many people from each city want him to come.

These are just a few of the examples that Obama used and shows a grander scheme of how the internet is being used in present day elections. Whether it is right or now can be debated, but this fact can’t be. The candidate who best utilizes the tools given to them by the Internet will have the inside track to the White House in 2008 and beyond.