Obama Wants to Be Your Friend

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I can read silly comments like "Wazz up John McCain?" posted by Cory, an 18-year-old male from Michigan. Or something more meaningful from Danny, 19, from Lodee, Calif, who writes, "Senator John McCain. If this truly is your myspace and you read these comments—I also agree with you we can't just take our troops out of Iraq. I believe the more segregated we are the more the terrorists are winning."

Republican candidates Representative Ron Paul (R-Tex.) and Mitt Romney have both accumulated more than 20,000 friends as well. Paul, by the way, has posted the rock song Critical to Get Political by Steve Dore on his profile, and his wife, the grinning, round-faced Carol Paul, occupies the first slot in his top 24 friends. Mitt Romney has gone with an Elvis Presley ditty, A Litte Less, and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is listed above Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat under books he loves. Meanwhile, among the Democrats, Clinton, former Senator John Edwards (D-N.C.), Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), and Obama have each cobbled together more than 20,000 MySpace friends. Obama is in the lead with 106,907 friends.

Obama has established himself as the most forward-thinking when it comes to the Web, but he also has made some critical missteps. On Apr. 29, MySpace took down 29-year-old Los Angeles paralegal Joe Anthony's unofficial Obama profile, which had accumulated more than 160,000 friends. The campaign officials were worried about not being able to control such a large group as it gained virtual street cred in MySpace. But the move was a classic example of not understanding the medium. The move backfired, angering many cyber supporters, and more than a month later, Obama has not regained all of his MySpace friends.

On Facebook, where all of the candidates have profiles, Obama is the only one who has taken advantage of Facebook's recent move to open the site to outside developers. Obama launched an application that lets supporters download to their Facebook profile up-to-date information on how many of their friends support the candidate. It also offers video of Obama and links to a profile where Obama supporters post messages that are a bit more coherent than those of their MySpace counterparts.

Turning Friends into Voters

One Obama supporter, Maxwell Gold, a 19-year-old Vassar student, posted a link to a software application he built. The software, or widget, which can be downloaded to any profile, lets the user collect all the Obama speeches that Gold has been able to find online. "I'm not that technologically savvy," Gold apologizes when asked about the widget. "It was like me trying to teach myself. It was fun."

This will be the first election in which Gold is old enough to vote, and he readily acknowledges that he wouldn't be paying attention this far in advance of the election were it not for the candidates' creeping onto Facebook. (As for MySpace? "I used to use it," he says, "you know, when I was young.")

Of course, the Holy Grail is trying to figure out how to turn the online enthusiasm and creativity of folks like Gold and Kaufman into offline votes. With many months to go before the election, it will be a long time before candidates can determine whether their efforts at social media pay off. As for me, I always vote, but I won't be signing up to be friends with any of the candidates.

Hempel is a department editor at BusinessWeek.
With Conrad Wilson, a BusinessWeek intern.