John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon brought in the first televised debate to presidential campaigning in the US in 1960. President-elect Barack Obama embraced the next step in campaigning in 2008 – social media.

Barack Obama’s campaign decided to spearhead the digital social space and it has paid off. I’m not saying that he won the election because of his Twitter feed or MySpace page, I’m just saying that it didn’t hurt to connect with younger voters in their comfort zone – the Web.

During his entire campaign, Obama made a point to connect with his supporters via My.BarackObama.com. My.BarackObama.com is a community online blogging space for Obama supporters. People could personalize the interface and post comments and videos conveying their opinions about the election on Obama’s personal site. Talk about feeling connected with your candidate! The online Obama community would interact and support one another, allowing a person to really be connected and devoted to the candidate.

In the blogosphere, Obama outranked John McCain in mentions.  Frederic Lardinois, a reporter for Read Write Web – a blog that provides Web Technology news, reviews and analysis – writes:

“While overall blog mentions of Obama and McCain varied greatly during the last year (and we can’t say if those were positive or negative posts), close to 500 million blog postings mentioned him since the beginning of the conventions at the end of August. During the same time period, only about 150 million blog posts mentioned McCain (though it would also be interesting to see similar statistics for Governor Palin as well).”

Meanwhile, Obama wasn’t the only one taking advantage of social media tools during the campaign. CNN kept in touch with “need-to-know-ers” via Twitter, sending up-to-the-minute tweets to followers all over the nation. For those that were interested in more than just the Tweet headline, links were provided to the relevant article on cnn.com.

MSNBC built out a widget to download onto your desktop in order to have the latest and greatest info on the election. Google kept up a Google 2008 election blog throughout the entire race for presidency. Their blog was armed with all of Google’s cool tools: access to YouTube links to learn more about the issues, Google Earth links to find out where to vote and later, who each state went to, and more.

And Obama’s presence in social media lives on. According to an article in AdAge by Michael Learmonth, “President-elect Barack Obama’s victory speech has been uploaded more than 500 times and viewed more than 7 million times on the web in the last 48 hours, according to web analytics firm Visible Measures.”

Now the question is where will social media go from here? It has already been accepted and widely adopted as a solid way to obtain news. Will Obama now attempt to integrate it into the government? Social media could easily be used as a way to keep tabs on the heartbeat of the nation. I suppose only time will tell how technologically apt the relationship between the White House and the US population will become.

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