Why Obama Likes Facebook

President Obama's campaign is expanding the power of the social media operation it built in 2008, using an app to extend its voter intelligence efforts to potentially millions of Facebook accounts of people who didn't directly get in touch.

The app, Obama 2012, gives the campaign access to the birth dates, locations, and likes—that is, Web pages a user has indicated he or she likes or identifies with by hitting the Facebook "like" button—of many of the Facebook friends of the 150,000 people who installed the app. That could feed the campaign valuable intelligence on a few million people: whether they are of voting age and live in swing states, what issues they care about, and who in their network might best influence them. Even though Facebook's policies forbid the campaign from using that friend data outside the context of the app, the information can still be used for the organizing and volunteering activities the app enables. In other words: don't be surprised, especially if you are an undecided voter in a swing state, if you hear from someone on Facebook with a highly personalized appeal based on things you've clicked online.