Obama Uses LinkedIn to Sell Jobs Plan to Voters

The U.S. president will be in an assembly organized through the social network.

Today, U.S. President Barack Obama stands up for his economic and fiscal proposals in an encounter with voters in California organized through the social network LinkedIn, as part of his efforts to make good use of digital platforms.

Obama will be part of a popular assembly hosted by the social network LinkedIn, in Mountain View, during his national tour through Washington, California and Colorado in order to sell his jobs plan and to gain funds for his reelection campaign.

His visit to California takes place in a moment of great anxiety due to the slow recovery of an economy that faces a national rate of unemployment of 9.1 percent. In California, the unemployment rate is at 11.9 percent. A recent opinion poll from the Public Policy Institute of California found that Obama’s approval rating is 48 percent among voters of that state.

A Field Poll from September 14 indicated that 46 percent of Californians approve of Obama’s administration and 44 percent disapprove of it. It is the first time that the president has fallen below 50 percent in these kind of opinion polls. Even so, opinion polls forecast that Obama would win over Republican presidential candidates in that state.

The encounter through LinkedIn, a social network of professionals with more than 120 million members all over the world, is expected to have a high economic content.

Following the main idea of his tour initiated yesterday in Seattle, Washington, Obama will highlight a $447 billionr plan for the creation of jobs that needs to be passed by Congress. According to the White House, Obama will answer online questions on his jobs plan and on economics to an audience of employees and members of LinkedIn; he will also answer questions submitted online.

Obama’s visit is a reasonable part of his electoral strategy to spread his message and to garner support of voters through popular platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Google, Facebook and LinkedIn. The use of these platforms is also an answer to the increasing fragmentation of consumers that, with the popularity of the Internet, have now many more options.

Next Wednesday, the White House plans to hold a forum addressed exclusively to Hispanics, with the participation of Yahoo Latino, MSNLatino, AOL Latin America and Latino HuffPost Voices.

Obama himself has an account in LinkedIn, in which he highlights, in addition to his present-day position, his past as a federal and a state senator in Illinois and his experience as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

Obama displays more of 500 connections in LinkedIn, a network that professionals from all industries use to increase their contacts and customers. His visit in California will include several fundraisers in the San Francisco Bay, San Diego and Los Angeles.

On Sunday, in several events in Washington, Obama posed himself as defender of the middle class and accused Republicans of obstructing reforms to foster economic recovery.

Obama will end his tour tomorrow in Denver, Colorado, where he will deliver a speech on his jobs plan at a time in which economic recovery comes to be a dominant issue for the 2012 elections.