Feels like bloggin'

One particularly clever use of social media was connecting a video called “The Life of Julia,” which depicted how the President’s policies would help a citizen throughout her life, to the viewer’s Facebook account. By the time the viewer finished watching the show, BarackObama.com had trawled through all of the viewer’s Facebook friends, associating their names and birthdates with voting records, gender, and state of residence.

“At the end of the video, when you’re presented with four people that you should share this with,” Conlow said. “Those are not four random people. It is a very calculated list of the four best people that we want you to share this with, ranked by however we’ve decided is the best way to target them. That data currently lives with Facebook, but I think there is a ton of web data out there like that that we are only beginning to use.”