So, the US has a new President. And one that is well aware of the potential of Web 2.0.

By targeting Gen-Y through the use of new Social Media platforms like Facebook, mySpace, youTube and Twitter, Obama has succeeded in effectively spreading support for his campaign across the Internet.

Make no mistake - Web 2.0, Social Media and Social Networking are a very real force in the world of PR. Harness those forces, and you will see very real results.

Obama has done just that. From social networking to his blog to his Fight the Smears campaign, Obama has made his Web 2.0 presence known. He has over 1.5 million friends on MySpace and Facebook, and he currently has over 45,000 followers on Twitter. This personal activity in social networks allows him to quickly get the word out across multiple platforms.

Obama has spent millions on his online campaign - from generating revenue indirectly by working out conversion ratios using GoogleAdwords, to sending campaign movements via SMS, and drumming up community support in online communities.

Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook, knows a thing or two about social networking, and has been heading up Obama’s campaign. Obama’s wooing of the social networking whiz may not have made headlines at the time, but it’s been a major factor in Obama’s success.

On Oct. 21, for example, Obama raked in more than 84 million views for his YouTube videos while McCain posted 22 million, according to TechPresident, a site that charts Web 2.0 election statistics. Over the past six months, 13,702 Meetup members have used the site to organize offline groups and events to support Obama, while 1,472 members are using it to rally around McCain.

For the seven days ending Oct. 22, Obama was mentioned 10, 291 times in the blogosphere, according to Technorati - which tracks blogs - compared to 3,924 mentions for McCain.

And Hitwise - which tracks Web traffic - noted that Obama was pulling in 67% of all Web traffic directed to presidential candidate sites while McCain was pulling in 32% of that traffic.

Obama has also continued to dominate on Facebook, with 2 million Facebook supporters on Oct. 9, compared McCain’s 564,000 for McCain. The Democratic candidate also leads on MySpace, with 749,000 supporters as of Wednesday compared to McCain’s 190,000.

Google has just published a patent application for Network Node Ad Targeting, in which Google hatches plans for identifying the most influential of a circle of friends and providing this ‘influencer’ with ‘financial incentives from advertisers in exchange for permission to display advertisements on the member’s [social network] profile’.

Doing so will ‘provide advertisers with the option of targeting either all members in the community or advertising only on the profile of the influencer, thereby targeting the entire community,’ explains Google. Who says you can’t buy friendship!

SHIFT Interactive is a Web 2.0 design agency in Sydney Australia. We specialise in harnessing what the Version 2 web technology provides including:

• Viral marketing Sydney Australia
• Flash Games Sydney Australia
• Corporate Blogging Sydney Australia
• Viral Video Campaigns Sydney Australia
• Web 2.0 Sydney Australia
• Social Media Sydney Australia
• Social Networking Sydney Australia

Viral Video is bursting onto the Australian Web 2.0 scene in Sydney with the same pace that enthusiasm for the concept of ‘multimedia’ bloomed onto the scene back in the 90’s. The difference now is that so-called multimedia is actually happening…

Use a viral video to launch a product, or a marketing campaign, and reach a massive potential target market which would remain untapped using conventional, offline marketing mechanisms. The beauty of the web is that the is no broadcast cost - if you’ve produced a viral video, you can launch that across the net with a variety of tools, and using a variety of social media and social networking sites, at no cost. Once the video is completed, load it into a number of sites using Web 2.0 tools, and it will snowball.

Web 2.0 has lots of potential. Here’s a good example of the video web 2.0 convergence which is increasing in use on a daily basis.

Kinda like youTube, but you can cue up a list of videos, which will then loop eternally, until you set up another playlist. You can also integrate the camera on your computer to host your own show, or upload your own videos…we like this tool, for sure!!

And then you can embed it back on your website. Here’s our channel using ‘Web 2.0′ as a our theme:

SHIFT Interactive, an online Web 2.0 company based in Sydney Australia have just engaged a super new product for injecting some viral marketing flavour into your online campaign. Check out VideoLove, a viral video marketing tool which allows you to easily load your video onto 20 video sites with the touch of a button.

Look at it as a way of video blogging - a way to easily spread a video across 20 networks. Think of all of those social media networks hungrily waiting for your videos…!

Web 2.0 logo designs make use of bright colours, user-friendly fonts and reflections. They’re nice to look at, and user-friendly. Social networking, social media sites all use nice candy-coloured graphics .

Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use social media and social networks to produce increases in brand awareness and product sales through digital viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses.

It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet. Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily. Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, corporate blogging, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages. The basic form of viral marketing is not infinitely sustainable.

Using Viral Marketing can be an incredibly powerful technique to increase exposure for your company. The term was coined by a Harvard Business School professor, Jeffrey Rayport, in an article for Fast Company called “The Virus of Marketing” in December 1996.

The very nature of the internet actually encourages viral marketing techniques - eyegrabbing graphics and animations, and animations will engage a user with your Viral.

And the fact that everything is connected on the web, one corporate blog post, one photo, video or article can spread like a virus. SO, if you create a campaign targeted to this specific end, your virus can become a very positive thing for your company!

Create something like a Flash Game to engage your user and encourage them to play again and again, then forward that game to their friends, and you’ve created your viral campaign, something that spreads through the veins of the communication paths of the internet.

Some Typical examples of Viral Marketing avenues and techniques:

+ Social Media channels, such as DIGG, Mixx, and Reddit
+ Social Network sites, such as mySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn
+ Viral Flash Games
+ Email Campaigns
+ Advertising Campaigns and games
+ Interactive Multimedia campaigns, using SMS, Telephony and Internet

These are all classic Web 2.0 techniques - every effective campaign will harness all the potential of the Web 2.0 world.

With last weeks’ rollout of Firefox 3, Mozilla has once again delivered a smooth, and integrated browsing experience.
New interface design is more user-friendly, the browser is more stable, and also appear to hog less memory, a common complaint of users of Firefox 2, particularly on Macs.

Interestingly, many of Firefox’s famous add-ons are still compatible with the new release. And many of those plugins are Web 2.0 plugins, harnessing social networking and social media tools.

Available immediately as a free download, the browser comes in approximately 50 languages and culminates a three-year effort on the part of thousands of developers, security experts, and testers from around the world. Reports from Mozilla highlight how popular the browser has become - the network at its peak served 17,000 downloads per minute, or 283 per second, and had sustained download rates in excess of 4,000 a minute, he said.

“We’re really proud of Firefox 3 and it just shows what a committed, energized global community can do when they work together,” said Mozilla chief executive John Lilly. (Apple Insider)

Flock started the Web 2.0 browser craze with many social networking tools built directly into the core of the browser.

A new release of Firefox 3 on tuesday, has spurred another download frenzy across the Web, with downloads at nearly a million already.

Now, 3rd party developers are leading the way on Firefox, with a rise in handy Web 2.0 style-addons being up uploaded onto the Firefox site

Some of my favourites:

Shareaholic

offers an easy way to submit the sites you’re browsing straight to Facebook, del.icio.us, Digg, Friendfeed, Google Reader, pownce, Stumbleupon and Twitter, as well as using the cool Bzzster ‘Email to a friend’ Web 2.0 App.

Clipmarks

gives you the tools to create your own online scrapbook from the websites that you browse.

PicLens

is one of my new favourites. Not strictly Web 2.0 (although it uses Web 2.0 APIs), this tool is very handy none-the-less!

Scribefire

is a great way to manage your blog.

Being an Australian, and with the majority of our media channels owned by American corporations, we’ve had our share of US Democratic Candidacy news here in Sydney, Australia. Politics aside, the online strategies of both democratic candidates has been an interesting thing to watch. Aggressively harnessing the power of online advertising, and Web 2.0 techniques such as social networking and social media channels, this US election has displayed a massive shift in media spend away from traditional media into the online arena.

According to Clickz, one of the web’s authority internet marketing sites, Obama’s online strategy has paid off. Taking corporate blogging into the political realm, Obama has regularly posted videos online throughout his campaign.

Indicating a significant difference in strategy (and deeper pockets), the Obama camp has spent considerably more on their online strategies. To say that online Viral Marketing is a force to be reckoned with is an understatement in 2008.

With Clinton spending 58% of her online spend - that’s $292,200 in 2007 and 2008 - on Google ads alone, and Obama spending $2.08 million just this year indicates a major difference in online strategies.

Has the online campaign paid off?

Well, some might say yes. Obama is now, after all, the Democratic Presidential candidate.

Obama’s online strategy towards generating donations has also been different to Clinton’s.

Eric Frenchman, chief Internet strategist at political consulting agency Connell Donatelli, agrees with the notion that savvy search efforts contributed to the success of both Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s primary season wins by helping them build lists of potential donors. Frenchman handles much of the McCain camp’s online advertising. Commenting on his Pardon My French blog last week, he wrote, “We get $3 - $4 in donations for every $1 we spend online.”

As one of the first Fortune 500 companies to set up a home in the blogosphere over two years ago, Southwest Airlines is making some major upgrades to its blog, Nuts About Southwest.

Nuts About Southwest was originally launched as a means of giving Customers a look inside the culture and operations of Southwest Airlines and allowing them to interact and build personal relationships with the airline’s employees. Over the last two years, the blog’s function has evolved to also serve as a virtual focus group, assisting the Company through crisis and new product launches.

Southwest Vice President of Public Relations and Community Affairs, Linda Rutherford, said “From the debate over assigned seating to the timeframe in which we release our flight schedules, the passionate comments and opinions shared on our blog have unquestionably influenced several business decisions.”

Nuts About Southwest features more than 30 Employee bloggers that represent a mix of Frontline and behind-the-scenes Employees including Mechanics, Customer Service Agents, Schedule Planners, Executives, Marketing Representatives, Flight Attendants, Pilots, and more.

The blog’s readership continues to grow steadily month-over-month, and has more than doubled year-over-year since its launch in Apr-06. The airline estimates that it has reached more than 500,000 customers through Nuts About Southwest alone, and they expect that number to exceed one million in 2008.

Web 2.0 is becoming more and more evident in websites designed in Sydney Australia. Though not as fast to harness the Web 2.0 phenomenon as their American Silicon Valley counterparts, Australian agencies are warming to the idea.

Web 2.0 is a wave that has washed across the Pacific onto Australia’s shores.

From corporate blogging to social networking and social media techniques, Web 2.0 means that users are more empowered, and have more control over their web experiences. The end result of this is that more and more users are contributing to the the future of the web.

Where those web sers come from - be it Sydney Australia, Silicon Valley, London, Tokyo, Barcelona, New York or Bangalore - begins to define more and more what users are actually reading.

More and more these days, social media websites are influencing search engine rankings. Having a story on DIGG or Reddit can mean a massive spike in traffic in the short-term. But the longer-term effects of that link are much more powerful. A link from a well-respected, or ‘authority’ site, is considered valuable. In the world of SEO and backlinks, high Google PR websites are all important.

As social media networks become more popular, and widely-used, their influence on Search Engine Rankings increases. This is one of the foundations of the Web 2.0 concept - an internet which is controlled more by the end user. If a user likes a website or story, it achieves greater exposure on a social media website. And of course this will enhance ‘organic’ search engine results. So the effects are somewhat multiplied.

A great list of Social Media Websites

http://traffikd.com/social-media-websites/

By no means comprehensive, this Social Media website list will give you a great overview of many of the more well-known social Media and Social networking sites.