President Barack Obama’s team is very active on social media. The Facebook page that carries his name has new posts twice a day on average with a mix of hopeful messages, political statements, and personalized views into life at the White House. On Twitter, they post several times a day with links, pictures, and quotes from the President. Google+ is a different story. It was only mildly active during the election campaign. After a peak of 19 posts in August, 2012, it started falling off quickly. In September, there were 11 posts followed by 5 in October. November, the month of the election, saw two…

President Obama’s successful re-election campaign last year was marked with many technological victories. They won most of the many battles on social media, held the attention of the media in a way that almost had the unbiased fabric of journalism tearing away to root for him, and dominated the devices to score major victories through mobile device marketing. From a fund-raising perspective, one of the campaigns most powerful weapons was good ol’ fashioned email marketing and their most powerful subject line may surprise many. “Hey.” That was it. The concepts of “I Need Your Support” or “Help…

Since the establishment of We the People, the US government site dedicated to allowing citizens to petition the government to respond to their concerns, the concept has been engulfed by follies, giggles, and sour grapes. It has not been effective in getting any real changes made in government and at times it has been more of a comical retreat as well as a platform where the opinions of the White House can be spread through “replies” that were already a part of public record. Today, we saw something different, something better. Today, the system might actually have worked as promised. A petition…

We were so close. A non-controversial bill,  the Video Privacy Protection Act, flew through the Senate and was sent to President Obama last week. The bill itself isn’t important; it allows people using services like Netflix to post the movies that they were watching directly from the service onto Facebook and other social media sites just as they can do now with music sites like Spotify. This is currently against the law because of legislation from 1988 when Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video rental history was leaked. That’s not the important part. What was important was that a section…