Visit Barack Obama’s home page this week and you’ll find respectful appeals to Hillary Clinton’s supporters, news, videos, inspirational quotes, and a variety of effective calls to action.  Take a look at John McCain’s homepage and you’ll see (amongst other things) a well-placed promotion for McCain golf gear.  Really.  

This kind of comparison should help explain why I predict that Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States. 

The Obama web team also does a great job of spreading the message all around the web. As the module on his blog page says, Obama is “Everywhere.”  There are readily accessible links to Obama connections and content on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Twitter, Eventful, LinkedIn, Blackplanet, Faithbase, Eons, Glee, MiGente, MyBatanga, AsianAve, and DNC Partybuilder. At Johnmccain.com if you dig deep enough, you’ll find links associated with myspace, facebook, and youtube. 

Click through to McCain's Myspace page and you’ll find that he has a respectable count of 53, 218 friends.  Obama, on the other hand, has 391,834 – and his myspace page – typically some of the crappiest looking pages on the web, even looks well-designed and, dare I say, presidential.    (For a good laugh, take a look at some of the 62 "friends" on Bush's MySpace page.)

Kudos to the Obama team for recognizing how times have changed and for mastering the use of interactive channels for the good of their cause.

- Jon Fox

NOTE: I'm writing a blog entry about what's beyond the blogs...not to argue against the existence of one.

The top story of the current issue of Business Week is entitled "Beyond Blogs: What Your Business Needs to Know." The four page article discusses blogs three years ago and how they have evolved over the years and what lies beyond the blogs. Business Week writes "According to a recent study from Forrester Research (FORR), only a quarter of the U.S. adult online population even bothers to read a blog once a month." So what are they reading and what social media tools are they using? Here are a couple:

• Twitter (a blog service limited to 140 characters) - used by Dell, H&R Block
• MySpace
• FaceBook
• Wikipedia - now becoming widely used by companies worldwide, including Flightpath

It's important to harness and allow social influencing, so have your business experiment with them all. Over time see which ones are most effective and continue to use it.

Check out the following:
Beyond Blogs: What Your Business Needs to Know
Business Week Beyond Blogs

Believe it or not, I've never really been one to watch soap operas and it seems that I'm not alone.  According to a fascinating article in yesterday's New York Times, all of the soaps have been shedding audiences for years, with one exception... It appears that over the past seven months, the CBS drama “As the World Turns,” which has been chronicling the ecstasies and miseries of life in the fictitious town of Oakdale, Ill., for 52 years has actually picked up viewers between the ages of 18 and 34.

How could this be?  Well, since its introduction of a gay-theme story line last summer, many younger viewers have tuned into ATWT, apparently after they were hipped to the story line via clips posted by fans to YouTube.  This is a fascinating example of the power of viral media to breathe life into one of the most old-school types of communication.  And speaking of old, let's not forget that CBS/Viacom's 85 year old chief Sumner Redstone, is one of the most prominent media execs beating the drum against YouTube's business model.  Clearly, he's missing a valuable lesson in this case. 

- Jon Fox