On Friday, Whitehouse.gov, the official website of the President of USA announced the following news.
Today the White House is taking steps to expand how the Administration is communicating with the public, including the latest information and guidance about the H1N1 virus. In addition to WhiteHouse.gov, you can now find us in a number of other spots on the web:
* Facebook.com/WhiteHouse
* MySpace.com/WhiteHouse
* Twitter.com/WhiteHouse
And with it the administration has almost nearly completed the 2.0-ness that it began the day Barack Obama became the President. Now with a blog and existing video sharing profiles the FB page, besides a Myspace and Twitter profile, it has completed the mandatory social circle on the web.
According to reports, White House new media director Macon Phillips said the administration will not be able to reply individually to people who send messages via Facebook, MySpace or Twitter. But, he said, “people who join these groups can speak to one another, and we can see what they’re saying.”
The profiles are already seeing a lot of activity. Facebook for instance already has over 157,000 fans, which though less than Barack Obama’s personal fanpage is bound to pick up as the enws spreads. MySpace has attracted over 174000 friends in the last 2 days and has over 4000 comments from the users. The profile page looks surprisngly similar to the official website in its design. Twitter expectedly has far lesser followers but is bound to pick up as well and currently has around 34000 followers.
While the move is certainly unprecedented for the US, it still has a long way to be truly social in social media. Currently all the sites are essentially updates from the White House blog. Hopefully, the White House administration will get more interactive on these pages though it is highly unlikely to happen in the near future.
Also, given the Indian elections currently, we have seen a lot of activity online by Indian political parties. It would be interesting to see if they continue their apparent ‘Obama Way’ of using the web even after the elections are done. And that certainly would include blogging and social networking the same way as Obama’s team is up to it now.
While there is nothing commercial about this, it certainly speaks volumes of the true identity of media. On a general note it lends weight to the idea that media is not a platform for advertising but essentially one for communication. Understanding this will help a lot of people use media (and therefore social media) effectively and move beyond numbers to create a bigger impact.
