First White House Cabinet blogger and Change.gov news December 6, 2008

I’ve been buried with a big project for a few weeks but now that it’s been delivered — yeah! — I wanted to post a few blasts of presidential transition new media news that have been piling up in my bookmarks folder:

Peter Orzag, tapped by President-elect Obama to head up the Office of Management and Budget, (OMB) did a final goodbye post at his former blog at the Congressional Budget Office, saying of his blogging experience:

“This blog has also been a special treat: it has provided another way of discussing CBO’s work and some of my own views about the policy world.”

OMB doesn’t list any blogs on its site but given the Obama administration’s emphasis on Web 2.0 technologies, it wouldn’t surprise me to see one developed to add another line of communication to the public.

In other transition news, HuffingtonPost reports that Barack Obama will publicize the names and agenda items of the groups that are meeting with its transition team on a new Change.gov site page called: Your Seat at the Table. On this page, online visitors can track meetings, view documents provided to the Transition, and leave comments for the transition team. John Podesta, Obama-Biden Transition Project Co-chair ,described the move in a staff memo: ” Every day, we meet with organizations who present ideas for the Transition and the Administration, both orally and in writing. We want to ensure that we give the American people a ’seat at the table’ and that we receive the benefit of their feedback.”

It will be interesting to see if the Obama team will offer any additional online engagement in the form of updates and comments on what they’re hearing in the public feedback. It’s one thing to solicit discussion of new ideas as they did previously on the issue of health care, but for this new site initiative, will they really talk the engagement talk beyond posting a “Comments for this discussion have closed” message?

“It’s the social media tools, stupid…” November 11, 2008

Now that Election Day is over and we have a new President-Elect, another huge winner coming out of Campaign 2008 are the new and ramped-up social media tools that played key campaign roles this election cycle.

Back in 2007, when McCain and Obama first announced their intentions to make a White House run, Twitter was barely a year old, blogging superstars like Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com were unknown and having texting numbers in the millions was pretty much only seen on American Idol.

Fast forward through 50+ primaries and caucuses, two nominating conventions, three presidential debates and one Election Day, and here’s a quick look at some of the highlights:

- Twitter: Barack Obama’s campaign Twitter feed continually ranked #1 in followers. The Obama campaign deftly leveraged Twitter’s ease of use and reach to send out daily tweets to supporters about campaign rallies and posted links to campaign updates and video streams. The McCain/Palin campaign’s use of Twitter was very limited with the campaign not showing a Twitter account as late as September ‘08. But what the official campaign site lacked, McCain supporters created, with their own Twitter feeds of McCain campaign news and videos.

For Election Day, a coalition of volunteers, tech companies and online news outlets banded together to create a real-time vote-monitoring web site called Twitter Vote Report where voters could report via tweets, mobile texting or phone calls on long waits, faulty voting machines, registration problems or if everything was moving smoothly.

- Mobile Texting: Barack Obama’s campaign put mobile texting on steroids. Texting was used to build massive supporter, volunteer and fundraising databases, as well as breaking news rollouts as the Biden Veep pick. Texting keywords like HEALTH or IRAQ would send mobile users periodic updates on the subject of interest and a dozen ringtone downloads from Obama speeches were offered as well. On Election Day, Obama supporters were sent constant text messages about GOTV volunteering needs and contacting friends who hadn’t voted yet. Can you imagine running a campaign now without using mobile texting as a major player in recruiting campaign volunteers, fundraising and votes? I can’t.

- Blogs: With all of those primaries and debates getting major broadcast air time, live-blogging came into its own using tools like CoveritLive to build audience for major media sites such as MSNBC.com and Newsweek.

During the campaign, blogging superstars emerged such as pollmeister Nate Silver, and internationally, blogging experienced explosive growth with the launch of sites such as the Reuters-sponsored Voices Without Votes, an aggregator of the international blogosphere focusing solely on the U.S. presidential race. The site’s tagline: “America votes. The world speaks.”

- Digg: Digg was used by both campaigns to move stories into the national spotlight. Over the Labor Day weekend, for instance, more than 40 stories about Sarah Palin, John McCain’s VP pick, received enough diggs to become popular. The site is also responsible for creating the early buzz and massive online fundraising for former presidential candidate Ron Paul.

- Community Sites: The McCain campaign created its own social networking site called “McCain Space” where supporters could post videos and photos as well as connect in forums. My.Barack.Obama, massively popular with millions of members, gave Obama supporters the online tools to create blogs, find local events and groups and contact undecided voters. In a recent post, Chris Hughes, an Obama staffer, revealed that post-election, the site will not be taken down and will remain up for continued collaboration among community members.