The Smug Baldy Speaks

If YouTube views were votes, then we’d be talking about President Barak Obama, and how he beat John McCain by a whopping 50 million votes. Below is a screenshot of the YouTube politician channel, and as you can see, Obama has over 1100 videos with over 54 million views to McCain’s 216 videos with just 3.7 million views. Indeed, Obama has three times as many videos and almost ten times the number of views as Republican internet sensation Ron Paul.

Obviously YouTube views aren’t really votes, and it’s not really clear how, or even if, they’ll somehow translate into votes. Obama’s success on YouTube does, however, illustrate the fact that Obama, much more than McCain, has an effective strategy to leverage social media sites like YouTube and Facebook to get his message out, and that very well could translate into more votes come election day.

Take, for example, Brian Stelter’s interesting article in the New York Times yesterday about the new media strategy of the Obama campaign:

The campaign’s new-media strategy, inspired by popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook, has revolutionized the use of the Web as a political tool, helping the candidate raise more than two million donations of less than $200 each and swiftly mobilize hundreds of thousands of supporters before various primaries.

The centerpiece of it all is My.BarackObama.com, where supporters can join local groups, create events, sign up for updates and set up personal fund-raising pages. “If we did not have online organizing tools, it would be much harder to be where we are now,” Mr. Hughes said.

What we see here is that the Obama campaign is doing more than just taking the internet seriously. They’re making it an integral part of their media apparatus. They’re staffing their web team with savvy professionals, and funding it as if victory depended on it. If this trend continues, and if the Obama campaign can somehow translate all the social media juice into tangible action in the voting booth, you can expect every future campaign to learn the lesson: Rather than simply a tool for poking your friends or for niche marketing, social media outlets can play a key role in selecting the President of the United States of America. And to me, that prospect is simply amazing.