How President Obama Plans to Use Social Media

Hundreds if not thousands of observers have already noted the key role that the Internet and social media played in the successful campaign of Barack Obama. But when he’s President, how will he utilize the hundreds of thousands of MySpace friends, Facebook fans, Twitter followers, My.BarackObama.com members, and SMS opt-ins (just to name a few points of presence) to advance his policies and politics?

First off, Obama needs to decide that he wants to make social media tools a permanent part of his political strategy. This seems like a given – the tools he used (along with several new ones most likely) will certainly play a big part his 2012 re-election bid and that of whoever challenges him – but to-date, maintaining this massive social media program has been the role of volunteers and campaign staffers. MySpace and Facebook weren’t even a blip on the radar when Bush won re-election in 2004 – creating full-time positions within The White House to manage social media would be a first, but presumably, something we’ll soon see.

So far, Obama’s social media tools have been all about organizing campaigners and viral marketing. But now that he’s on his way to the presidency and no longer a campaigner, Tweets about upcoming rallies and embedding Obama speeches around the Web suddenly isn’t very useful. So how does he change the way he uses these tools once he’s in The White House?