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Politicians jumping into social media, seeing new outlet to voters

U.S. Senate candidate Marco Rubio is about to go on MSNBC's Morning Joe. Attorney General Bill McCollum, running for governor, updates supporters that he is ``honored'' to get the endorsement of Gov. Charlie Crist. And Sen. Dan Gelber, hoping to be Florida's next attorney general, wants you to know he's thankful for America's veterans.

So goes politicking and campaigning in the era of Facebook and Twitter -- cyber-mediums that allow users to interact constantly and quickly through updates, Web links, videos and photos that can be viewed via computers, BlackBerrys, and iPhones.

Taking a cue from President Barack Obama's successful campaign, and from their children and grandchildren, elected officials and candidates are harnessing the popular social networking tools to drive home campaign platforms and reach voters.

Politifact.com: Ros-Lehtinen leads in Twitter influence, clout

In the Tweet wars, U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen comes out a winner, according to one study reported by Politifact.com.

Measured by the sheer number of followers, House Republican Leader John Boehner leads the Republicans in the House with 18,800 Twitter followers, followed by Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-Va., with 16,500.

But it was Ros-Lehtinen of Pinecrest who led House Republicans in ``clout'' and ``influence'' thanks to frequent re-tweeting.

Mind your manners when venturing into social networks

A year ago, the two of us set out on a mission to help two kinds of people: Those who get social media and those who don't.

We've been poking and prodding you (and each other) for a year now to behave better not only on sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but also on the devices we use that keep us constantly wired.

We used data from Compete.com to compare those three sites' traffic over the past year since we began writing this column. Facebook topped the trio, with growth of more than 200 percent in average unique monthly visitors. (Facebook itself releases data on the number of active users, which it estimates at 300 million, which, if it were a country, would be the world's fourth largest.)

Many wired Chinese unfazed at possible Google exit

A world without Google? They can imagine it just fine in China. After all, it's not like losing "World of Warcraft."

The online giant's threat to pull out of China over censorship has drawn little reaction among the country's 384 million Internet users. No flood of complaints to China's consumer rights agency, like the tens of thousands received in one day when the online fantasy game "World of Warcraft" was yanked last year because of a bureaucratic turf battle. Nor has there been the type of fury that saw 32,000 indignant gamers participate in an online chat session on the "World of Warcraft."

"If Google leaves China, we'll lose one search engine. But we still have other choices," said 28-year-old Deng Zhiluo, who works in marketing in Beijing. He said while Google's search results are more "international," most of what he wants can be found on Chinese competitor Baidu. "For locals, Baidu is enough."

Consider Ning to broaden social networking strategy

Your business Facebooks. It Tweets. But does it Ning? There are about 300,000 active groups on Ning -- many of them brands and interest groups -- and about 40 million users actively participating in them. If your business has a social media strategy (and there had better be a strategy) you might want to consider setting up a Ning network.

It's where you can take any topic and make a social network community for it in less than 10 minutes. I spoke to Ning's chief operating officer, Jason Rosenthal, who says that every month, there's a 14 percent increase of active Ning networks. There are about 2.1 million networks, not all active. That's about 40,000 new and active networks created a month.

Why take the time to create a whole new network on Ning when you can just make a Facebook Fan page? Tracey Udas, a social media strategist at Excelerated Performance, said Ning gives her business clients more value because you can track more data about members.