Journalism, Politics, and Social Media Converge In An Egyptian Jail

The intersection of politics, journalism, and social media became even more striking over the past few days as student journalist James Karl Buck was arrested along with Mohammed Maree, an Egyptian friend who was helping him report on political unrest in Egypt.

In large part thanks to a Twitter post after his arrest, legions of onliners came to his virtual rescue, contacting the US Embassy and the University of California which quickly dispatched an attorney to Egypt to meet with authorities. Buck was soon on a plane out of Egypt, but his friend Maree's whereabouts still appear to be unknown after a second detention by police.

Details of this remarkable and still very active story are at Buck's blog. Maree's wherabouts are still unknown as of this writing at 10:30 am Saturday.

Politics - Viral Video Style

Earlier this week Daya Baran discussed the amazing difference in the online advertising strategies of the Clinton and Obama campaigns, with Obama spending one million dollars on Google advertising in February, Clinton a paltry $67,000

Today, Brian Stelter at the New York Times is noting another example of how "tuned in" the Obama campaign appears to be to social media. In the this article Stelter follows the success of a video posted online of an Obama speech that got marginal mainstream coverage, but was a huge online success as it was passed along, linked to, and viewed by millions of mostly young voters. He makes this important observation about the impact of social media:

In one sense, this social filter is simply a technological version of the oldest tool in politics: word of mouth.

Although the internet has always been more about people than about technology, the new simplicity and ubiquity of social networking tools is allowing everybody to participate where in the fairly recent past only a relative handful of the technologically adept or adventurous dared to actively engage with others online. This flood of new online socializers has led to the launch of hundreds of companies - many of which are likely to fail, but some of which have already brought untold riches to the creators.

Obama's campaign immediately recognized and leveraged the power of the new media where it is not clear yet that the Clinton campaign really understands this social networking aspect of the political landscape. Perhaps Clinton thinks that because the demographic match is not as tight as with Obama's younger crowd their marketing money is better spent offline, but this decision to ignore the legions of voters who socialize online may come at a very high cost.