Barack Obama Can’t Figure Out How to Use Google+ Either

The prez joined Google+. By the sound of it, his team is a little confused about what to do with it.

As anyone who’s read the Steve Jobs biography knows (I’m assuming that’s most of you by now) something interesting happened with the release of the iPod: for the first time a corporation bestowed serious legitimacy on musicians through its marketing campaign. U2 had never licensed one of its songs for use in a commercial, turning down tens of millions of dollars along the way. Suddenly they let “Elevation” appear in an iPod spot for free. Such was the endorsement power of the iPod commercial—they thought they’d be getting as much out of the exposure as Apple.

Similarly Barack Obama, being perhaps only our third-ever “cool” president and our first-ever properly internet-connected president, has enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship with social media.

When Obama first began campaigning for president in 2007, MySpace was still a viable option and Twitter was still in zygote form. More importantly, social media was identified by youth and felt somewhat counter-cultural — much like rock and roll.

As his campaign kicked into high gear through 2008 Obama famously used the exploding growth of Facebook and later Twitter to his advantage and when he became elected the first president with a high-profile Facebook page, it helped tip the phenomenon well into the mainstream. Suddenly Facebook was place for every generation, and you started getting messages from your grandma and your friends’ still-natal babies.

Obviously this social media explosion would have happened without Obama, but nonetheless it’s still newsworthy when he joins a new platform, as if the presidential nod is an official acknowledgement of the changing modes of our communication. When Obama held the first Twitter Town Hall the company’s co-founder Jack Dorsey was invited to moderate, he bestowed upon the company a sense of newly heightened status. Same when Obama first checked in on Foursquare.

Now, Mashable reports that Obama has joined Google+. For months speculation has swirled that despite an initial burst of enthusiasm Google+ was kind of a dead zone. A month after it launched there was a report that traffic had already cratered 3% in a week rather than growing, and while it had all kinds of robust features the learning curve seemed to be a little steep to really pull many people away from Facebook for long.

Wednesday a verified Barack Obama profile page launched, but its first post was a sort of tacit acknowledgement that president’s team isn’t really sure what the the hell to do there, either: “We’re still kicking the tires and figuring this out, so let us know what you’d like to see here and your ideas for how we can use this space to help you stay connected to the campaign.”

It remains to be seen whether the president joining Google+ will grant an air of legitimacy to the network or whether political burnout and social media burnout, which seem to have ramped up in tandem since the president’s last election, will dampen the whole effect of the presidential endorsement.

At any rate, if the administration wants some pointers on how to use Google+ effectively, they can take a look at Britney Spears’ profile, who has just surpassed Google co-founder Larry Page as the most followed Google+ user with 739,469 followers.

[Image via Shutterstock]