ITS News

Online social media & networking sites have been present in our lives for over 15 years.The first one appeared in 1997 and was known as SixDegrees.com, it was followed by Friendster in 2002, MySpace in 2004, and Facebook in 2007; with the list continuing to grow rapidly today. However, it wasn’t until 2008 that social media made an appearance into political campaigns via President Barack Obama. What effects did social media have on his 2008 campaign and how are the President and GOP hopefuls using social media for their 2012 campaigns?

Howard Dean (2004 candidate) first used the internet in his campaign to raise money from supporters, but President Obama took it a step further in 2008 by using interactive web tools to organize his supporters, and advertise to voters.  One site that President Obama heavily utilized was YouTube, “The campaign’s official stuff they created for YouTube was watched for 14.5 million hours,” Mr. Trippi said. “To buy 14.5 million hours on broadcast TV is $47 million.”

Obama also had a strong presence on Facebook during his campaign; he had won nearly 70 percent of the vote among Americans under age 25 – otherwise known as the Facebook generation.

During the 2008 elections, voters took to the web to check claims candidates made against each other, and then shared the information they found with other web users. They also used the internet to refresh their memory on speeches the candidates had made.

After winning the election, Obama he created the website change.gov in order to better communicate with the American people during the transition period and made the commitment to interact with the people of the United States on a personal basis. The Obama administration later made the move to (whitehouse.gov), which allows people to ask questions, learn more about current issues, and find out what the government is up to.

It’s been four years since the last campaign, and social media use as grown drastically; Facebook as gone from 44.3 million users to 143.3 million, Twitter has grown from 3.4 million to 24.1 million and online video viewers have went from 121.4 million to 178.8 million. Without a doubt, the growth in social media will result in targeted, well thought out campaigns for the 2012 elections.

When looking at the Facebook fan Leader board, AllFacebook.com, President Obama’s Facebook page ranks at #46, with 25,038,400 total fans, and a daily growth of 37,872. When it comes to the Politician Leader Board he ranks as number 1 and is followed by Michelle Obama at number 2, Sarah Palin as number 3. The first GOP competitor to show up is Mitt Romney at rank 7 with 1,449,382 and a daily growth of 7,196 followers. GOP hopeful Ron Paul shows up at number 17 with 838,823 fans and a daily growth of 3,527. President Obama’s Facebook presence far surpasses that of other political figures.

The use of social media is sure to have a huge influence on the Election of 2012; according to a May 2011 study done by Social Vibe, 94 percent of social media users of voting age watched a political message in its entirety on a social media site and 39 percent then went on to share it with an average of 130 other users. In October 2011, a Digitas survey found that almost 40 percent of information found on social media will help determine their voting choices as much as traditional media sources like TV or newspapers.

So far in 2012, the candidates have continued to utilize social media as their go-to marketing strategy. Some candidates have even started  to push the use of mobile voter registration with the help of Allpoint Voter Services, Inc.  How do you predict the candidates will use social media for the election of 2012 and what ways have you used to make informed decisions?

For more information, Check out this Infographic by MDG Advertising on Social Media and Politics!

If you are an individual or company looking for new qualified leads, look no further than the largest professional network; LinkedIn. Many of you are on LinkedIn, have an account set-up, and have entered your experience, education, website, etc. What a lot of people don’t know is how to use LinkedIn to generate targeted leads on a daily basis. 

There are many different things one can do on LinkedIn to better brand themselves and their respected company. What I want to focus on is LinkedIn groups and how you can use them to your advantage.

Did you know, 80% of members belong to at least one group and 50% are active on them? With 135 million users, there are more than 67 million waiting for you to join the conversation and connect. Here is how you make LinkedIn groups your gold mine of leads!

• Join groups in which your target audience resides. For example, if you want to promote a new tool or product that you developed, join the eMarketer Association and start a discussion about your product. Ask people to check out what you have done and review it!
• To build off joining targeted groups, in order to generate leads and meet new people, you have to get in the action, discuss, ask people to connect, etc. Simply joining a group and posting a discussion will not get you what you want. Join other people’s discussions and make intelligent comments.  You never know who will be searching for you to connect! Yes it takes time, but this should and needs to be part of your marketing strategy. Also, don’t forget, anytime you comment, also end with a link to your site or wherever you want them to go.
• Many of the big time marketing and social media groups have discussions already posted asking people to share their Facebook, Twitter, and blog. Here is where a lot of the gold is. When you post in these discussions and share your sites, people will like and follow you back. Many will even write on your wall, tweet @ you and drop in a nice message. This is where you capitalize, engage and comment back, start to build a relationship, share a link to your site, etc. If you can get them to go to your site and do something that you want, doesn’t that qualify as a lead?
• If you have the LinkedIn plug-in installed on your blog, anytime you generate a new blog post, you can click on the LinkedIn share button and then share it will all of your groups you are associated with. If you belong to 10 groups and there are 100 people in each group that is 1000 people that will hopefully see your blog post and share. Remember, solid content produces results when shared in targeted places.
• Lastly, if you are joining groups that you feel will help you become better educated, stay current on the industry, learn about your target audience, etc. take time to get to know some of the people in the groups you belong to and invite them to connect, maybe even have a phone conversation or coffee? You never know what conversation you can spark up or how you can help each other succeed!

If you have any other advice or tips on how to better utilize LinkedIn, please feel free to share!

As the use of the Internet continues to grow, rules and regulations are being put into effect to keep it monitored. In this post, we discuss PIPA and SOPA, two laws currently being debated in the house and how these laws will affect your use of Internet. These laws are targeted at rogue websites in countries that are more acceptable of copy right infringement.

Protect IP Act (PIPA) – This law is targeted at domain name providers, financial companies, and ad networks and “will give U.S. corporations and the government the right to seek affirmative legal action with any website that they see as enabling copyright infringement weather of U.S. origin or not.” Streaming of unauthorized media will also be considered a felony and it will be the responsibility of the web publishers and host services to restrict their users from posting materials that infringe on copyrights.

Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) – This bill would work with PIPA and would “allow the U.S. government and private corporations to create a blacklist of censored websites, and cut many more off from their ad networks and payment providers.” Essentially, this means that the government could restrict access to websites who are in violation of copy right infringement, as well as prevent search engines from linking to the site, and prevent payment services such as PayPal from conducting business with websites who are in violation.

Some big companies who support SOPA include: ABC, CBS, Comcast/NBC Universal, ESPN, Marvel Entertainment, MasterCard, National Football League, News Corp, Viacom and many others. These companies support the act because it is a way of stopping the piracy of movies and music from oversea sites. When movies and music are pirated, the companies lose money. In a 2010 interview, rapper Lupe Fiasco is stated as saying:

“At a bare minimum it costs me, literally out of my own pocket, it cost me $3,000 to $4,000 to make a song. It costs me about $700 to $800 to make a freestyle. I’m giving you that … Just imagine if I work with The Neptune’s, including studio time and everything that goes into it – flying people around – it gets up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars to make a good song… … So to kinda see it on the Internet and, for some instances, for sale, who are you to have the right to tell me that I shouldn’t demand payment or feel a certain way for seeing people put my music out there like that? If I chose to do that, that’s one thing. But I didn’t choose to do that. That music was stolen” (The Boom Box).

Numerous tech companies have spoken out against SOPA including: Disqus, eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn, Rackspace, Reddit, Tumblr, Wikipedia, and many more. The reason that these companies oppose the presented SOPA bill is because they fear it could change the internet as we know it by introducing censorship of certain websites. The law would require Internet providers to monitor their users web traffic and block websites that are involved in copyright infringement.

GoDaddy.com originally showed support for the act, but when thousands of domains boycotted GoDaddy and transferred their domain to NameCheap, GoDaddy.com switched their stance and is now against SOPA.

Reddit has announced that on January 18^th, they will temporary blackout their site for 12 hours and replace it with message about how SOPA could mean the end of user-generated content sites such as Reddit, Facebook, Youtube, and so forth. They will also be live streaming the House committee hearing on the SOPA bill. It is rumored that Wikipedia, Google, Twitter, and Facebook may join in; however when asked, Google and Twitter did not provide comments.

This is just a snapshot of some of the laws that are going into effect during 2012. Share your thoughts and comments on these laws, we’d love to know where you stand in regards to SOPA and PIPA.

To learn more on how these two laws can affect you, CLICK HERE.