Candidate Obama Beat President Obama At Web 2.0

Posted by Mitch Wagner on June 12, 2009 02:29 PM

When Barack Obama was running for President, he made aggressive use of Web 2.0 and social media, but as president he's been more cautious. Why? The Center for American Progress, a liberal policy and advocacy group, has the answer: It's a lot harder for a sitting president to use social media than it is for a candidate.

Read Write Web writes:

Center for American Progress, a liberal policy and advocacy group, just released an interesting memo (PDF) about the White House's use of Web 2.0. There can be little doubt that the Obama campaign skillfully used the Internet to raise funds and create and manage a grassroots organization that, in the end, carried them to the White House. Now, however, a lot of us have grown a bit restless, looking at how slowly the White House is adopting Web 2.0 tools like social networks and blogs, especially when compared to the Obama campaign. This memo, however, puts things into perspective. While the campaign team dedicated over 170 staffers to new media, the White House New Media team has fewer than 10 full-time employees.

The report looks at other obstacles to White House Web 2.0 adoption: In making the transition from candidacy to presidency, the Obama team's social media initiatives have "to scale from 10 million motivated supporters to 300 million Americans. While it would be great if the White House could respond to every comment on a blog individually, it would be hard to scale this with just a handful of people running whitehouse.gov (and, because this is Washington, there is already a White House Correspondence Office that is officially charged with answering letters and calls from citizens)."

Comments from the White House need to be cleared by relevant agencies, while Candidate Obama simply needed to ask an expert about, for example, North Korea, and then use that expert's opinion as a talking point. "[B]ut now, White House bloggers don't just speak for the campaign, but for America, and a talking point could have real, potentially dangerous consequences."



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