The White House has cranked up its social media activity since Obama was elected president (following his campaign that used it extensively), with yesterday’s State of the Union address being the most interactive ever. It was streamed on YouTube, and the White House promised to respond to tweets using the hashtag #SOTU, to posts on the White House’s official Facebook page, and to questions posted on Quora. The White House’s social media storm is set to continue with an upcoming Google+ Hangout, and now Vice President Joe Biden is scheduled to answer questions from Twitter users in his first ever Twitter interview.

To participate, tweet questions using the hashtags #SOTU or #WHchat, and Twitter will be selecting questions for the Vice President to answer. Then on Thursday, January 26th at 1:10p.m. EST, live from Rochester, New Hampshire, where he is set to talk earlier in the day, Biden will respond through the official @VP account. Other administration officials will be answering questions throughout the week.

Fortunately for the White House, it looks like its social media strategy is paying off, at least in terms of engagement. During the State of the Union Address, 766,681 tweets mentioned “State of the Union” or used the hashtag #SOTU.

Twitter is getting more involved with politics as it gears up for the 2012 elections. This time, the company has announced an official involvement.

In a tweet today, the official Twitter account dedicated to politics announced that the U.S. Department of State will start answering questions it pulls in from the micro-messaging service:

U.S. @StateDept to answer questions from Twitter at weekly briefings. Use #AskState. RELEASE: state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/20…

— Twitter Government (@gov) January 4, 2012

In an official announcement from the Department, it detailed plans to pull in questions globally that use the #AskState hashtag:

Beginning this week, the Department’s Spokesperson, Victoria Nuland, will take questions from the worldwide public selected from the Department’s 10 official Twitter feeds (Arabic, Chinese, English, Farsi, French, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Urdu) and answer them at the podium during the Daily Press Briefing each Friday afternoon during the month of January.

If you’d like to ask the U.S. Department of State a question, it suggests that you direct them to the following accounts that handle various languages:

@StateDept (English)
@USAbilAraby (Arabic)
@USA_Zhongwen (Chinese)
@USAdarFarsi (Farsi)
@USAenFrancais (French)
@USAHindiMein (Hindi)
@USAemPortugues (Portuguese)
@USApoRusski (Russian)
@USAenEspanol (Spanish)
@USAUrdu (Urdu)

If you can’t catch the live press briefings every Friday, you can check out the YouTube channel that the department has set up, where it will post all of the sessions upon completion. This is a pretty cool initiative, since this type of access has only been granted to members of the press in the past.

This year might just be the year that sites like Twitter and Facebook actually make a difference in the election. Last Caucus night in Iowa yesterday, reports hit Twitter about how close voting was among the candidates, potentially swaying those who hadn’t participated yet in another direction.

I’m not afraid to admit that I’ve found myself completely confused by the Stop Online Piracy Act, better known as SOPA. Politicians bank on Internet users being confused about the act as well, so it’s time to brush up on your SOPA knowledge.

One awesome (and anonymous) person decided to put together a short but sweet Google Doc called “SOPA For Dummies” and it cleared some things up for me, hopefully it will do the same for you.

Here’s an excerpt:

SOPA explicitly states that companies will be liable for everything their users post. Sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Wikipedia, or any sites that allow user generated content CANNOT exist under these laws. Immediately after this bill is passed, you will see the media mafia (MPIAA, RIAA, etc) replacing websites like Wikipedia with commercialized encyclopedia software. Mainstream media outlets will not cover this bill because they are the ones lobbying for it.

And for your reading pleasure, here is the entire thing:

Mainstream Twitter interaction with television programming continues, this time with the Fox News broadcast of tonight’s Republican debate in Iowa. The network is asking you to share your thoughts on how the candidates are doing by using your best Twitter voice.

Fox is using Twitter in a pretty unique way, according to the company blog:

Political debates give citizens a way to hear from the candidates themselves on the issues that matter most. In the past, we’ve all experienced this important phase in the election cycle by gathering around the TV to watch candidates exchange views in real-time.

Twitter helps you share the debate-watching experience more directly and powerfully by bringing you closer to the candidates, commentators and other voters. Tonight, you can weigh in with a Tweet as the debate progresses. At 9-11 p.m (ET) / 6-8 p.m. (PT), seven Republican presidential candidates will take the stage in Iowa and participate in the Fox News debate. Tell Fox News, the campaigns and pundits whether or not you think the candidates are really answering the questions.

#Answer or #Dodge?

Two simple hashtags are being introduced by Fox News tonight, and you can attach them to your tweet full of thoughts about a candidate.

If a candidate is on target, use the hashtag #Answer, and if they’re not on the up and up, simply attach #Dodge to your tweet.

You can follow all of the action in real-time over at http://live.foxnews.com

It appears as if Twitter is getting ready for a huge political season with the 2012 elections coming up. The platform has become a home to many politicians, allowing them to reach out to their followers and supporters directly. This is a job well done by the Twitter Communications team, and it’s a foreshadowing of some unique uses for the platform, specifically on the campaign trail in 2012.

I’m sure Barack Obama and his team will be following the reactions.

Technology and politics go together like peanut butter and jelly. With Twitter being such a huge part of the campaign in 2008, specifically for Barack Obama, mainstream media is looking for more ways to visualize data to tell the whole story of a presidential election.

NBCPolitics has inked an exclusive deal with location check-in service foursquare, to provide data and graphics on where each candidate and their team is visiting, or checked into.

Here’s what the foursquare check-in data will look like on NBCPolitics.com, and future TV broadcasts:

The “Campaign Check-ins” map will be shown during the entire campaign cycle, leading up to the elections, on NBC’s site. In addition to this map, NBC and foursquare are creating co-branded political badges that will be available in 2012.

Vivian Schiller, Chief Digital Officer at NBC News had this to say about the partnership:

NBC News’ partnership with foursquare will allow our audiences to more fully engage with the 2012 campaign. By leveraging foursquare’s location-based technology, users will be able to go follow candidates and experience NBC’s election coverage in an innovative and unprecedented way.

This is a huge mainstream partnership for foursquare, giving the service the same kind of front and center treatment that Twitter had during the elections in 2008. Director of Media Partnerships for foursquare, Jonathan Crowley, sees this as a way for people to feel like they’re along for the entire campaign trail:

All politics is local, and foursquare is all about location; it’s the perfect way for politicians to communicate their actions to potential voters. Through this partnership with NBC News, we’re making it easy for people to keep up with all of the excitement on the campaign trail in real-time.

What will be even more interesting is if we’ll be able to get a decent sample size of data from foursquare to see how well-attended the voting booths are during the actual election.

Following politicians on Twitter can be as boring as watching paint dry on some days, but a new app pulls together tweets from both parties, and shows a whole host of trends about what they’re tweeting about.

PolitickerUSA is a simple app that displays tweets from every politician that uses the Twitter platform. At the very least, the service is the best social list of every U.S. Senator and Representative on the web.

You can watch tweets fly by in real-time, or you can filter them by your favorite politico.

One Nation, Under Tweets

PolitickerUSA is extremely well designed, and splits politicians on the homepage by their political party affiliation. The tweets flow in, and you can click them to drive you straight to Twitter.

Where PolitickerUSA gets really interesting is with the trends that it puts together into a cloud, based on mentions of words and phrases in the politicians’ tweets.

You can check trends by party, or by individual politician. These features make the site extremely useful, especially around voting time. If you’re not sure where a politician stands on important matters, getting a 50-100 tweet snapshot of what they’re talking about will give you a good idea.

You’re given a drop down of all of the politicians listed on the PolitickerUSA site, so you can literally spend hours going through all of the data. The clouds definitely help with displaying the important sentiments, thus skipping the boring process of actually reading the tweets.

One the homepage, you can do a filter search if you have a specific interest, and you’ll be shown the matching tweet from each side of the political fence. If you’re super into politics, or you’re trying to pay more attention, PolitickerUSA will be your best resource for up-to-the-minute political information.

With Tumblr helping us make phone calls to our Representatives about the “Stop Online Piracy Act”, this app can help us tweet to them about it too.

➤ PolitickerUSA

The Google Politics team posted about a new initiative today, wanting to get user assistance in spotting political campaign trends.

It has long been thought that political campaigns could be decided long before the actual campaigning and voting process starts, so it’s interesting to see Google dip its toe into this type of analysis.

The team said:

As the campaign season heats up, one of the ways our Politics & Elections team has begun to participate in the conversation is by highlighting some of the more interesting trends from our search data around candidates, issues, and campaigns. One example of a trend we spotted might explain why GOP Candidate Herman Cain is rising in the polls, while Texas Governor Rick Perry is dropping: four of the top 10 cities with the most searches for [Herman Cain] are major cities right in Texas. According to Google Trends, in all of 2011, Cain is rising fast in Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.

In asking its users to get involved, the Google Politics team had this to say:

Do you support a candidate in a race? Do you support an issue? Turn to our tools to show that you are part of a larger trend.

We’ll look to feature some of these user-submitted trends over the course of the next year right here on our blog.

Using our tools to spot trends is easy and fun. We encourage you to utilize our Insights for Search tool, Google Trends, the Google Ngram Viewer and even Google Correlate to discover and unearth interesting trends, patterns and connections. Once you find something interesting or newsworthy, drop it into the form below.

It’s great to see Google adopt a social approach in its products overall. Up until the past year or so, we’ve blindly used Google search, Gmail, and Analytics, not knowing what interesting things could be done with the data that we share. With this type of initiative, we’re given a clear idea on how powerful our thoughts, intentions, and opinions are. However, will this affect the way you use the products now you are aware?

And will companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook be able to predict the outcome of a political race one day? With as much information as we share today, it may very well happen soon.

To get involved in Google Trend spotting, jump right in and share your thoughts with Google using the form below.

Earlier this month, the blog Think Progress, a media outlet funded by the Center for American Progress, published a post asking its readers to “Join Our Effort To Expose The Billionaire Brothers’ Far-Right Agenda.”

The billionaires referenced are the Koch brothers, considered by many in the progressive sphere to be the main influencers behind a number of right wing movements currently underway. The post appeared shortly after a senior Koch operative had singled out Think Progress as leading an “orchestrated campaign” against the two brothers, and the blog was responding in kind by asking its followers to donate money to fund its anti-Koch reporting.

How quickly it was able to amass thousands of dollars for this campaign is a testament to the sophistication of The Center for American Progress’ social media operations. Created in 2003, the think tank — referred to often as CAP — is widely considered the progressive response to The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that has highly influenced Republican policy over the last several decades.

CAP contains several branches, including its various media outlets, its action fund, and its Campus Progress (which is geared toward college students). The organization focuses on a mixture of advocacy and influence, ultimately trying to push forward progressive policies into the ranks of Congress, media outlets, and various institutions of power both inside and outside Washington.

During an interview at its downtown DC offices, Alan Rosenblatt, associate director for online advocacy, told me that the Koch fundraiser was originally supposed to amass $10,000 over a several-day period. Instead, it raised it in just a few hours, causing the team to go back and ask for an additional $50,000.

He outlined all the various platforms he has at his disposal for such a campaign, and it quickly became clear over the course of my meeting with him that CAP’s online media operations are vastly more intricate than your typical DC advocacy organization.

Consider its email lists as an example: The main list has over 600,000 addresses, but they’re broken down into dozens of subcategories, including members of Congress and their staffs, members of the Executive and their officials, a subset of activists, and people who have signed up to take action for CAP’s campaigns. “And then we have issue groups,” Rosenblatt said. “And within those issue groups, we have high level influential people, policy professionals, press, and also high level influencers in the government and in the advocacy and policy world. Those lists are culled together from people who come to our events, the contact lists of our policy experts, and then we have sort of secondary lists in each category of people who have signed up on our website for an email list on that particular issue.”

While using these various lists to push out the Koch campaign, Think Progress was able to employ its own considerable reach to amplify the message. The think tank also has multiple channels on different social media platforms, with thousands of fans and followers on various Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. Rosenblatt even created a custom short URL on a pro bit.ly account: Cap.af/kochfund.

Though the Think Progress blog teamed up with Rosenblatt and others within the organization to raise the money for this campaign, such a collaboration is actually rarer than you might think. That’s because Think Progress is a completely autonomous outlet, meaning that its editors have editorial independence from the rest of the think tank.

Faiz Shakir has been the editor of Think Progress for several years and oversees a staff of nearly 20 people. He told me in a recent phone interview that having an institutional blog “churn out propaganda” wouldn’t have succeeded. “You need to be able to speak as a voice of a progressive movement,” he said. “And that means putting out content that isn’t necessarily tied to the institution and sometimes getting out ahead of the institution when there is some need to do so.”

If the senior people at CAP were at first skeptical as to whether this would work, the success of Think Progress over the years would have relieved any fears. The site gets several hundred thousand readers a day and has an email list — called The Progress Report — with over 100,000 subscribers. What first started as a blog with only a handful of writers now sports a team of investigative journalists and researchers who are producing original reporting that will rival most major news organizations.

“When you start to add [more reporters], it gives me more flexibility to do a variety of different things that I couldn’t do before,” Shakir said. “The idea of doing exclusive reporting, traveling to different states, reporting from conferences, doing deeper investigations into Koch or the Chamber of Commerce, those are all generally things we wanted to do even when we were a smaller staff. We just didn’t have the capacity to do it; if you live in the online sphere the challenge of getting up content every single day is a monumental one, and particularly for a blog that tries to feed content once on the hour every hour it is pretty demanding. So if you have five people it’s basically going to take all their effort. Now we have a large enough staff that you can actually take people off the immediacy of the blog to do either traveling or deeper investigations into areas that we want to devote some time and resources to.”

Though the blog doesn’t have any process beats — you won’t see someone with a Capitol Hill or White House reporter title — it has hired beat writers on several different policy subjects, including climate, health care, the economy, and national security. In addition to its main blog, it also publishes the Wonk Room for more in-depth policy analysis and Matthew Yglesias, one of the earliest progressive bloggers to gain significant influence.

By having autonomy from the rest of the organization, Shakir explained, it allows the blog to get ahead of the information curve and catch trends as they’re still bubbling up to the surface. Waiting for the think tank’s senior staff to decide on a policy position would take away this ability to remain nimble.

That’s not to say that Think Progress doesn’t encounter situations in which it awaits input from CAP’s policy analysts before taking a position. “Let’s take Libya as an example,” he said. “Are we for a no fly zone? Are we against a no fly zone? We as a blog aren’t sure, and the institution is holding meetings to determine what is the best posture on that, and we’ll generally wait to see the outcome of what that is without leading with our heads first and taking a position the institution isn’t comfortable with us taking. Again, a lot of that is laid on my shoulders and the Think Progress editors who are going to be responsible enough to see when those issues arise and not lead with our heads first.”

In addition to his day-to-day advocacy campaigns that are tied to the news cycle, Alan Rosenblatt also works on a number of long term projects and is deeply embedded within the DC community of policy thinkers. With his PhD in political science, he teaches a number of classes at the Georgetown, John Hopkins, and American universities, and used to teach full time at George Mason. It’s not uncommon to run into Rosenblatt at any number of happy hours and tech events in the city, and he’s often leading panel discussions on social media advocacy.

He told me about a recent incident in which the “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page faced potential jeopardy. If you’ll remember, Khaled Said was a small businessman who had been dragged into the streets by Egyptian authorities and beaten to death last year. After his death, activists had created the “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page, and it’s often credited with helping to spark the political uprising that led to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s ousting.

Nadine Wahab, a communications director for the Rights Working Group, contacted Rosenblatt out of concern that the Facebook page would be taken down. Because Facebook does not allow anonymous users, there was fear that Mubarak’s supporters could use this rule to either oust the page’s creator or get the page shut down completely. Rosenblatt has connections with Facebook employees and after introducing Wahab to them they were able to secure the page while also protecting her identity. Not long afterward, Mubarak formally announced he would step down.

But Rosenblatt isn’t just content with using social media to influence these political uprisings in foreign countries; he wants to be able to predict them. He helps organize an Internet Advocacy Roundtable — made up of dozens of policy experts — and this month will be leading an event that explores how the lessons from Egypt could allow them to use social media to map the future of the political landscape. “We’ll tackle how we can use social media to see how the different players are organizing themselves to get a sense of what the results will be,” he said. “Which groups will be players in the formation of the next Egyptian regime, and how can we use that model of using social media to predict uprisings and their aftermath for other countries so we can get ahead of the game on some of this stuff.” The panel will include experts from Harvard, MIT, and, of course, Nadine Wahab, the savior of the “We Are All Khaled Said” page.

CAP’s biggest goal, perhaps, is to influence both foreign and domestic policy in Congress, particularly when it comes to passing actual laws. Rosenblatt told me that social media allows constituents and activists to gain a whole new level of leverage when it comes to pressuring Congressmen and their staffs.

“When they click through to send an email to a member of Congress, the only person who really absolutely knows the email got into the congressional office is the congressional office,” he said. “We may know from our back end that it was delivered, and perhaps that it was opened, but whether or not it was opened by an intern and discarded, or opened by a legislative correspondent and discarded, or passed along up to the legislative director and the chief of staff and accounted for in their decision making process and done so in a timely fashion for the vote you’re trying — all of that is unknowable, you have to take them at their word.

“When you target a member of Congress on their Facebook page, it’s public and there’s a level of accountability that is akin to a sit-in outside their office. Whereas the sit-in outside the office might be only people who walk by or catch it on the news, everyone who comes on the Facebook page will see people posting the comments. Everyone posting on Twitter will see the tweets launched at them.”

In the long run, he hopes this will force Congressmen to address their national constituencies in addition to their local ones. It used to be that you had to go through the archaic process of asking your local Congressman to approach one of his colleagues on a particular subcommittee in order to get a piece of legislation introduced to that subcommittee. Now, social media users can just go after the subcommittee members directly.

For instance, CAP recently engaged in an anti-genocide campaign in which it targeted 10 members on the House Foreign Affairs Committee to ask them to sponsor a conflict minerals bill. “Within 24 hours 500 people posted on those [Facebook] walls,” he recalled. “We got two of them to co-sponsor it. Three more that we hadn’t targeted but who saw the writing on the wall also co-sponsored it. The chairman said, ‘Let’s take this bill, and oh here’s this other bill [for which CAP was advocating] and let’s pass it through the committee unanimously.’ They both became law, one within two weeks, one within two months.”

Cause and effect. Through its sophisticated campaigns, CAP was able to use a few simple tools to micro target its way into actual legislation. But perhaps the real accomplishment is what came after:

“The chairman contacted us and said, ‘We did what you asked us to do, will you please send your activists back to our Facepage to thank us?’”

Alan Rosenblatt and his colleagues were more than happy to oblige.