President Obama asked his Facebook followers to help him in his battle in Congress. The result was amazing! Politicians use social media and social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, really they do.

The victory of Barack Obama clearly demonstrated the power of Social Networks. Obama was able to raise money, build an army of supporters and communicate with them through Social Networks and Web 2.0 tools.

Last week President Obama used once more the Social Networks power to raise public support for his Health Care Legislation. The legislation was about to pass the Congress. President Obama asked at 21 of October his Facebook fan page followers for 100.000 phone calls to Congress to demand the votes needed. By the end of the day the number of phone calls to the Congress supporting the Health Care bill was over 315.000 (some would call it the first presidential denial of service attack :-) ).

Imagine now if you could have the same number of people supporting your cause or company.

White House has it's own Flickr Photostream.

But Obama is not the only one using Social Networks. I was searching through Flickr (my favorite social network) for interesting photos to post at Wooz.gr when I came across this “Downing Street” account. That was the starting point of today’s blog post. White House has also a Flickr account.

Downing Street's Flickr Photostream

A quick search for politicians in Facebook reveals that Arnold Schwarzenegger has a fan page with some 218.600 followers. Nelson Mandela has only 215.126 supporters when Nicolas Sarkozy has 176.000, Silvio Berlusconi 167.000 and Mir Hossein Mousavi 118.000. On the other hand the fan page of “Jeremy Clarkson for Prime Minister” (the famous TV persona of Top Gear) has an impressive number of 383.000 followers (this also shows that Social Networks can also be a funny place).

If politicians are changing the way they communicating with their voters, don't you think that it's about time your company do the same with it's customers?