YouBama, iBama, ManypeopleBama

With Super Tuesday closing in on us as we speak, I figured a politically centered post was most appropriate. The 2008 presidential campaign has been the most technologically focused campaign of all time. Candidates have reached out with a variety of forms of social media to attract voters and to connect to them on a personal level. Some people have gone so far as to say that this is the first YouTube election. With millions upon millions of campaign dollars at stake, and the hopes of several devout supporters candidates are continuing to look for new ways of garnering more attention and votes through the world wide web.

But as we learned in our class there are people who might support an idea, product, or cause so much that they desire to support that on their own, without any assistance or payment from the very thing they support. Such is the case with the new grassroots website YouBama. Created by two Stanford grad students, the site serves as a grassroots outlet for supporters to upload testimonials, music videos, clips of Obama on television, and practically anything related to the Obama campaign. An interesting feature is the rating feature which allows users to vote videos up and down much like the site Digg. Uploaders have featured such notable people as George Clooney, Jimmy Carter, and Charles Barkley but most of the contributed videos are from everyday people who simply want to promote their inspiring candidate.

This is another example of citizen marketers who are impacting the public relations through social media. The creators did not make the site for any profit, and do not wish to create any other sites for other candidates because they feel, "this site is most applicable to the Obama campaign because of its efforts to reach out to younger voters and speak to their aspirations." What happens when brand loyalty is fused into a candidate and mixed with a little bit of Web 2.0? Well you get just another way for a candidate to reach out to a voting population and try to impact a generation most often noted for its apathy.