Case Study - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 13:05 - 2 Comments

Obama Brings Social Media to the White House

Well, unless you have been completely “off the grid” the past few days, as my friend Danny Clayton so eloquently commented recently, we have a new President. It’s no secret that President Obama’s campaign used social media masterfully last year to win both his party’s nomination and general election. Now it appears the new President is bringing social media right to the oval office.

I became aware of a site called Change.gov shortly after the election that is a full-blown social media site about the Obama presidency. It seems our new president wants to hear our ideas on what he should be doing. Visitors of the site can vote on the best ideas. So far, over 125,000 users have submitted about 44,000 ideas and cast more than 1.4 million votes. The best-rated ideas will be gathered into a Citizen’s Briefing Book to be delivered to President Obama in the oval office.

Idea sites like Dell’s Idea Storm and Starbucks’ My Starbucks Idea have been documented as very successful social media case studies. What has made them successful is that they have really paid attention to the ideas, acted upon the good ones and explained why the impractical ones wouldn’t work. They have created a dialog with their customers.

While I applaud the attempt by our new Commander-in-Chief…the question remains, will he actually act on any of the proposed ideas and create a dialog with the American people? At the time of this post, the second most popular idea on the site was to legalize marijuana…and that was posted under homeland security! Anybody as nervous as I am?