Social media scorecard

Here are some additional stats from Adult Add Strengths blog that highlight the gulf in Obama and McCains social media presence.

- Barack Obama had nearly 6,000 percent more pages on his main website than John McCain did on his (1,820,000 vs 30,700)
- There’s almost 3 times as many results for Barack Obama in Google images (24,200,000 vs. 8,620,000)
- Obama has 51% more hits in Google Video as there is for John McCain (136,000 vs. 89,800)
- Flickr, the photo sharing site, had nearly 5 times the search results for Obama than McCain. (50,000 photos on Obama’s flickr page and 7,000 contact)
- Facebook had 3,032% more hits for Obama than McCain, Obama’s Facebook page had nearly 4 times more followers and posts than McCain’s page
- Barack Obama’s added 400,000 new friends on Facebook in the last 2 weeks, a 20% surge.
- On Youtube, Barack Obama had nearly twice as many search results for his name as John McCain, and more than 5 times as many videos posted
- On MySpace, Obama had nearly 4 times the number of friends as McCain, and 269% more search results for his name
- On the microblogging site Twitter, McCain put out nearly twice the number of tweets as Obama, but Obama had 5213% more followers, and 1,129% more search results

Obama: the aftermath

So the US elections were very exciting weren't they?! Or do you think it was a done deal way before the vote?

There has been a huge amount of discussion on the US election and Obama's successful campaign. It is virtually impossible to miss, from donating Facebook profiles to support the cause, to Twitter updates, from blogs analysing the campaign to YouTube videos of the latest news commentary.

I'm going to add my tuppence worth to the conversation by saying this:

Social media was critical to campaign success as I previously discussed here and as highlighted in this ComputerWorld article.

Sarah Palin was key to McCain's failure highlighted by Matt Damon here and demonstrated in this interview with Katy Couric.

That's all I'm saying!

Learning from Obama

I attended a conference a few weeks back and found that the speaker used the same social media slides as me - the same messages, the same visuals and the same statistics. Although this was laborious, I did take away one great nugget of information.

Obama's online campaign had key strategies to achieve its overall objective - raise money and build a community of believers in order to form the 'Obama' brand the way social networks are formed. Hilary on the other hand focused her efforts on advertising and traditional media. Below is a summary of how the two politicians spent their campaign budgets:

Not only did Hilary spend almost three times the expenditure, she also focused her efforts on a medium that Obama's advisors chose to completely ignore. In the first two months of fundraising Obama raised US$91m compared to Hillary's US$37m. The rest, as they say, is history!

This is a fascinating example of how social and digital media is affecting politics, and the wider world, and its approach to influencing people. Even now, if you search Obama on MySpace, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter, you will find cleverly designed vehicles where he delivers his messages and 'wins' your heart.

This is a key lesson to be take on board when devising PR campaigns for clients.

Source: Webguild March 2008