BarackObama.com

The topic of Barack Obama's usage of social media in his political campaigns, including podcasting, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube has been compared to the adoption of radio, television, MTV, and the Internet in slingshotting his presidential campaign to success and as thus has elicited much scholarly inquiry. In the 2008 presidential campaign Barack Obama had more "friends" on Facebook and Myspace and more "followers" on Twitter than his opponent John McCain.

Obama's official website is barackobama.com. It is run by Chris Hughes, one of the three co-founders of Facebook, and has been described as a "sort of social network".Steve Spinner, a member of Obama’s National Finance Committee, says that while previous campaigns have used the internet none had yet taken full advantage of social networking features. The website included online tools that allowed members to identify neighbors that the Obama campaign thought might be potential backers and then report back on any resulting conversations.

Members of the site could also create blogs, post photos, and form groups through the website, but each member must publish limited biographical profile and no more than one photo. According to Hughes, during the 2008 campaign, over two million accounts were created for the website to "organize their local communities on behalf of Barack Obama". He estimates that more than 200,000 events were organised through the website. Moreover, 400,000 articles were written in blogs. 400,000 videos that supported Obama were posted into YouTube via the official website. 35,000 volunteer groups were created. $30 million were spent by 70,000 people into their own fundraising webpages. In the final four days of the 2008 campaign, three millions phone calls were made through the website's internet virtual phone.

In March 2007, the Barack Obama team created an interconnection between a user's account in Obama's official website and Facebook account, so a user may publish activities via sending postings from one to another. In 2008, the Obama presidential campaign spent $643,000 out of $16 million Internet budget to promote his Facebook account. On June 17, 2008, after Hillary Clinton ended her campaign, number of followers of Barack Obama's Facebook account increased to one million. Meanwhile, in addition to Facebook accounts of Barack and Michelle Obama and Joe Biden, the Obama team created ten more Facebook accounts for "specific demographics, such as Veterans for Obama, Women for Obama, and African Americans for Obama."

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