Barack Obama & Twitter

Just heard from @charityhisle that Barack Obama has stopped using his Twitter account, and sure enough, his last Tweet was on November 5th. I'm curious as to what reaction people have to that - Do you feel that he is abandoning his Twitter followers now that he has been elected? Or do you feel that it is justified as he has bigger issues to deal with other than updating Twitter (or paying someone to update it for him)? Thoughts??

I actually got that as a RT of @BethHarte! I can't take credit!

I will say this, like I said on Twitter: did anyone REALLY expect anything else? Why keep up with the interview process if he's already won the job?

@mikepfs thinks he'll be back in 3 years. I think he'll be using a much larger social media scale next time; he's going to need it.

I don't know... I see that as more of his unofficial volunteer committee. Imagine if you had a friend who was helping you network to find a job. They invite you to events and introduce you to people. Then, the moment you get a job, you stop calling that friend back. I don't know if that's how people should see it, but I think some people will see it that way. I think it would have been a "safer" move to slowly dwindle his tweets until nobody noticed anymore...

I can definitely see people being disappointed by this, that's all.

As Beth indicated, it was just a marketing tool for him. If used again in the future it will be for marketing/campaigning only. If you take a step back and look at what Twitter is, it's just a soap box for people to market for the most part. It's also evolved into a huge chat room. Five years from now it will be interesting to see if Twitter even still exists.

I tend to agree with you, Mark. Twitter is growing quickly, but it's still far from mainstream compared to many other sites. Maybe they will find a business model in time for the '12 election.

Brent, I don't think you should feel too abandoned ... The Change.gov site is open to all, accepts comments from users and doesn't limit the President-elect's staffers to 140 characters in their communications. And Obama has more important things to do now than tweet -- he's still in intense negotiations just to keep his Blackberry!

Mark, I think you hit the nail on the head, as far as him seeing it as a marketing opportunity. But I don't think that his followers felt that - I think they felt they were a part of something special and not just a number in a marketing campaign. For example, I follow your tweets because I find your tweets to be interesting and I like the conversation that comes out of them. But if I found out later that we weren't having real discussions and they were just part of a marketing campaign, I would feel disappointed. They aren't, of course, but he's run the risk of alienating people who do feel that way.

And Mike, it's impossible for me personally to feel alienated in the slightest, but my point is that if you end up alienating a significant chunk of your audience, was that a good move?

Brent, I can see where you are coming from, but as with any social media site the back-end purpose of it is to market. While the pretty front of it may seem like a fancy place for people to connect, it's all marketing. This site is another example. In the end, it's a way for people to connect with the end goal of marketing their business, themselves, or using it as a tool to grow their business in some way. It's all marketing. And just because it's marketing doesn't mean it's not honest and true. That's actually what makes the marketing message so compelling. If you and I weren't honest in our communications there would be no reason to talk. That fact that we enjoy following one another on Twitter and sharing conversations here helps us both to market our brands and hopefully grow our businesses.

In the case for Obama, he has to choose which sources give him the biggest return for his investment. Investing time and resources into Twitter will no longer give him the return for the investment at this point, and he may never justify it again. It wasn't really him anyway.