Saturday, 7 June 2008

What won it for Obama

Q - What is the most popular group on Facebook?

A- Barack Obama with 900,000 members. You can add to that some pretty high membership counts on MySpace and other social networking site - not least his own http://www.my.barackobama.com/. Using such social networking sites, Obama has raised $265m from 2m donors - an incredible achievement. He did this by the classic 'viral marketing' methods of getting volunteers to set up their own small local fund raising Facebook groups.

Obama also spent $3.47m on online advertising - 82% went to Google.

Compared with Obama, the use of the net - and social networking in particular - by British political parties and politicians looks positively archaic. Gordon Brown has just 183 'friends' on his facebook site. Not surprising as he doesn't seem to have done anything with it. David Cameron has over 3000 'friends' on his Facebook site which seems pretty new (but so far unexciting). If British political parties are serious in getting Generation M interested in voting - then they MUST embrace social networking. Perhaps Obama's success in the USA will act as a catalyst for change over here too.

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