Obama slow jam on 'Fallon' just a taste of 'epic' social media war ahead

The pressure to evolve new strategies is a direct result of the way users adapt to being targeted. Our “filters” are getting savvier alongside technology, he says, so companies have to continually get more creative for us to get the message.

He points to President Obama’s appearance on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" on Tuesday – a show that engages online users as well as traditional broadcast viewers. It was not enough for the president to simply be interviewed on the show. he says: "He was actually integrated into the entertainment, performing in one of the show’s regular sequences, "Slow-Jam-The-News."

“We will see new methods of interacting with voters, learning from them and offering new ways to get involved and share their support,” says Anthony Rotolo, professor of social media at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies in New York, via e-mail.

Expect to see both candidates attempt to leverage social media data with the potential of offering a real-time understanding of how the public feels on any issue or how candidates are doing at any given moment in a region, he adds. 

While there is a notable social media disparity between President Obama and GOP presumptive nominee Mitt Romney – perhaps most visible on their Facebook accounts, where Romney has under 2 million “likes” to Obama's more than 26 million – the playing field has evened in unexpected ways since 2008, says Mr. Rotolo.

In the last few years, he points out,  “other demographics have joined sites like Facebook, Twitter, and new networks like Pinterest in much larger numbers. This presents an opportunity for Mr. Romney to leverage social media to reach audiences who were not as accustomed to interacting in this way on social networks during the 2008 campaign,” he says.

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