During his successful campaign for the White House, Barack Obama was able to harness the power of social networking in a way that no other candidate had ever done. As I wrote in an Editor's Corner just after election, "Obama's Victory Proves the Power of Web 2.0:"

"No matter what your politics may be or whom you voted for last Tuesday, one thing is crystal clear about this election: Barack Obama was able to raise money, build a grassroots army of supporters and communicate with his many followers using Web 2.0 tools."

As the president's first year has drawn on, he has tried to apply many of these same techniques to keep communication with citizens open, and to advance his own political agenda.

Pushing healthcare reform

The most prominent issue of the moment is healthcare, and President Obama has used his arsenal of social media tools--including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube--to push his legislation. Just last week when it looked like public support for the healthcare bill might be flagging, the president was able to call on his social network and do something remarkable. On October 21st, the president posted a request on his Facebook page for 100,000 calls to Congress.

By mid-day, they had surpassed this number and were calling for 150,000 calls. By the end of the day, they had blown through this and ended up with 315,000 calls. This is impressive no matter what your political leanings; it shows the power of using Facebook and other social tools to push an agenda, especially when you have a politician with followers who are ready to act. In this case, it's not clear what the outcome will be, but certainly members of Congress must feel the pressure that kind of power brings to bear on the process.

Going open source

Just this week, the president's web team announced that Whitehouse.gov was moving to an open source content management system. They chose Drupal, a tool that made our list of "Top 5 Open Source Content Management Systems." This was a big boost for the open source software movement in general, but it was done for a number of reasons including trying to build in more social interaction into the system than was possible under the previous system. Tim O'Reilly writes in a blog post called "Thoughts on Whitehouse.gov Switch to Drupal" that this was done to increase the flexibility of the underlying CMS:

"Drupal has a huge library of user-contributed modules that will provide functionality the White House can use to expand its social media capabilities, with everything from super-scalable live chats to multi-lingual support."

What does this mean to you?

While building social tools into the process increases interaction and could make the government more accountable, and yes democratic (small d), it also provides a way for politicians (and you) to build tools to interact with constituents in ways that were not possible before. Now, just think if you apply these kinds of lessons to your own business to encourage transparency, accountability and communication internally and externally. It could change the way you do business and give you access to a powerful communications platform.

The president has repeatedly demonstrated how to use these tools to communicate with a group of engaged followers. Imagine those same people were going to bat for you, for your products or to support your company. It would give you a powerful force working for you that doesn't require a huge investment to implement. Of course, you won't have the reach of the president, but you have the same opportunity to motivate and interact with employees and your customers, and you would be foolish to ignore it. - Ron