Social media fire lit by ’08 Obama campaign may be burning out: professor

OTTAWA – The fire lit under the American electorate by Barack Obama’s use of social media in the 2008 election campaign may be sputtering in the lead-up to the 2012 presidential election.

Diana Owen of Georgetown University is in Canada this week giving presentations on social media and the upcoming U.S. elections to American consulates here.

She says the novelty factor that was social media in the 2008 and 2010 campaigns seems to have worn off.

Obama set records that year for fundraising and organizing campaign events via Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

Owen says that level of enthusiasm was hard to sustain and so far in 2012, nothing has surfaced as a substantively new way of engaging people.

But she says that’s not stopping candidates from getting ever more aggressive with how they use tools like Twitter and Facebook to get their messages out and keep the money rolling in.