White House, Obama 2012 re-election campaign: mobile apps, social media

The Obama White House and the Obama 2012 re-election campaign want to be on top of mobile devices trends, as the government and political teams study how to communicate on a mass basis. On Tuesday, the White House announced two new developments in White House mobile apps. On Wednesday, the Obama team picked the Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. for President Obama to host townhall meeting on reducing the deficit.

From my column: *Social media in 2012 is completely different from 2008. The most significant new media for the Obama re-election team in 2012 may be apps on mobile devices; laptops are pass with a younger crowd. Twitter was new in 2008 and relatively minor in the Obama universe, with some 80,000 followers at the end of the campaign. As of last Thursday night, Obama’s official Twitter account had 7,404,242 followers.”

From Whitehouse.gov post: According to the numbers, more and more of you are using mobile devices to access content on WhiteHouse.gov. In the last two months, 6.6% of visits to WhiteHouse.gov came from the iOS or Android operating system – nearly double the share of visits over the same period last year (3.6%)