Obama's Re-election Campaign Puts Facebook Front And Center … Literally

U.S. President’s Barack Obama’s re-election campaign just been kicked off, and it – again – makes clever use of Facebook as a tool for spreading the word and amass supporters.

When you connect to your Facebook account on the campaign website, an interactive banner will appear on the top of the website that shows you which of your friends aren’t “in” yet, profile pictures included. You’re invited to put post a message to your friends’ walls to prompt them to join the ‘Are You In?’ application.

You can easily scroll to your friend list by skipping from one to the next, and you can add an optional message when you opt to post to a friend’s wall.

This is how the message appears (just for illustration, I’m not even a U.S. resident):

Obama’s Facebook page has been ‘liked’ by close to 19 million people.

According to a message posted on the campaign website, they’re starting off ‘small’ both online and offline and plan to boost efforts at a later stage:

One thing that may strike you is that there’s just not as much here as there used to be. As this campaign gets off the ground, we want to start small—online and off—and develop something new in the coming weeks and months.

The idea is to improve upon what’s worked for the past four years, scrap what hasn’t, and build a campaign that reflects the thoughts and experiences of the supporters who’ve powered this movement.

And later:

This is just the beginning. We’ll be adding to this site, opening new field offices, training organizers, and developing plans every single day, and we hope you’ll play an active role.

The first step of all this is an unprecedented program to hold one-on-one conversations with millions of supporters about where they want this campaign to go—look for lots of news about that over the next several weeks as the process unfolds.

YouTube is also one of the things that have apparently worked over the past few years. In emails and text messages sent to supporters earlier today, in which Obama announced that he would be filing papers to launch the 2012 campaign, the video below was promoted.

Twitter, for whatever reason, seems to be not that big a deal for the campaign.