Facebook Benefits Obama Most

August 2, 2008

As candidates embrace more and more web 2.0 concepts, they begin to outpace many companies in their use of new age tools. Recently in fact the McCain campaign emailed a series of videos which let his supporters choose which video is the better choice at showing the media love affair with Barrack Obama.

Shortly thereafter, the Obama campaign pushed out a video of the candidate making a rousing speech in Germany.

But which candidate do you suppose has the most web 2.0 street cred? In a Google search on the word Facebook, the second result is as follows:

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Barack Obama | Facebook

Welcome to the official Facebook Page of Barack Obama. Get exclusive content and interact with Barack Obama right from Facebook. Join Facebook to create ...
www.facebook.com/barackobama - 58k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

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The amazing thing about this result is it even beats the Wikipedia entry which comes in at number five.

A look at the Barrack Obama page on Facebook shows 1,253,483 supporters in fact. A look at the John McCain Facebook page shows a much lower 187,894 supporters.

This is not surprising as one expects Obama supporters to be younger and subsequently more accustomed to using Facebook.

It does come as a surprise to me to see how high the Barack Obama Facebook page ranks on Google. Assuming the second result Google displays is the most popular page associated with Facebook, this is quite an accomplishment.

For the Obama campaign this online support shows that his campaign likely does not need to spend as much money to influence its base as the McCain camp does.

Still for the McCain camp the online world is not to be forgotten as it is my feeling that many of the candidate's supporters are busy executives who may not use Facebook but may be on LinkedIn and various news sites.

Just as competitors like Coke and Pepsi battle for mind share across disparate media vehicles, so to do candidates increasingly need to research, measure and manage campaigns across multiple types of media and in doing so truly build a world class integrated marketing campaign.