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Is it a coincidence that Facebook and the Democratic party share a color? Understanding the pervasiveness of the social media giant, Obama's campaign utilized the power of the "Like" in the 2008 election, translating this cyber-support into votes at the booth for an edge over his competitors. Since then, Obama has solidified his alliance with the social media giant, holding a town-hall meeting at Facebook's headquarters and of course, maintaining his Internet presence. With 22 million fans, he has 10 times more Facebook support than the 10 declared GOP presidential candidates combined, who come in at 2.1 million, RealClearPolitics reports.
But Facebook does not want to be thought of as a wing of the Democratic party. "The color of the site is blue, but the color of the company is purple," Joel Kaplan, former deputy chief of staff in the George W. Bush White House and Facebook's current vice president of U.S. public policy, told RCP's Erin McPike.
In an effort to move away from their partisanship, the company has recruited a strong Republican presence, "Five high-profile GOP strategists have joined Facebook's outreach team in recent months; they say one of their motivating factors is simply learning how it works so they can deliver that knowledge to their party's politicians." Obama already gets the game: "It turns out that incumbents tend to not want to mess around as much, because that means added risk,” Clay Johnson, the co-founder of Blue State Digital, a consulting firm that played a major role in developing and implementing Obama’s new-media strategy in 2008, told The Daily.