Hillary Clinton Demonstrates The Power of Social Media

We have already seen some politicians use sites such as MySpace and Facebook to reach out to the younger voters, but recently Hillary Clinton posted the question, “Based on your own family’s experience, what do you think we should do to improve health care in America?” on Yahoo! Answers.

Joshua Porter at Bokardo has some good comments on this. This action really shows the power of social media. At time of posting there have been about 36,000 responses to the question, with the majority of them being quality responses.

But this presents another problem. Who in the world is going to read through 36,000 responses? I give Hillary (or her campaign managers) for making an attempt to reach out, but how would anyone be able to make use of this data? An interesting revenue model for a Question and Answer site would be something similar to what physician community site Sermo.com does. Allow companies to sponsor a question and provide analysis tools to parse and make sense out of the mass amounts of data.

Other sites in the social networking Q and A space include Faqqly.com and Funadvice.com.

[tags]Social Networking, Social Network, Online Communities, Yahoo Answers, Hillary Clinton, Sermo, Faqqly, Find Advice, Bokardo, Brian Balfour[/tags]