Opinion: Obama’s social media gurus leave, cutting his online hangouts
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
During his campaign, Barack Obama seemed to be just about everywhere you turned online.
But lately, President Obama has narrowed his social hangouts on the Web to a select few sites. You’ll still find him or his team posting videos to YouTube and uploading photos and links to White House blog updates to his Facebook public page.
There’s also a White House blog. Which is cool, but its lack of a comment system makes it very antisocial.
BarackObama.com still shows a relic of what was the most exciting adoption by a candidate of new technology.
Scroll down to see the website’s ‘Obama Everywhere’ section, which shows his 16 active accounts on some of the most popular social networking sites.
The Ticket reported a few weeks after the November election that Obama’s social networking had vanished. Since then, he’s been an active participant of a couple of websites, but his profiles on Twitter, Flickr, Digg and the other 11 remain vacant.
Meanwhile, Obama’s campaign staff are duking it out in the media for the title of most influential or king guru of social media.
Countless reports claim to have interviewed the ‘tech guru’ or the ‘media wizard’ or the online ‘mastermind’ -- who incidentally turned out to be different people. The Huffington Post breaks down the campaign staff’s frustrations:
Take the case of Thomas Gensemer, who two weeks ago was introduced by the British media as ‘the man behind [Obama’s] online election campaign,’ a description that even Gensemer acknowledges is overstated. While he played an integral role as the managing director for Blue State Digital -- the company responsible for Obama’s innovative web tactics -- his connection to the campaign was a bit removed. Joe Rospars, co-founder of BSD, was Obama’s much-heralded tech strategist.
Instead of letting these folks vent over colleagues undeserving of all the credit, maybe Obama should bring some of them into the White House. Because as evidenced during the lead-up to his election, there’s sure a lot more that can be done online than what’s going on now.
-- Mark Milian
The president may have abandoned some social media, but that doesn’t mean you should. Register over here for Twitter alerts on each new Ticket item.