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In 2008, social media played a big part in the presidential elections as candidates like Obama, Ron Paul, and to some extent McCain utilized sites like Facebook and Twitter to expand their campaigns.  This year, they will be even more important and candidates are already working hard to take advantage of every tool they can to get ahead.

Both President Obama’s re-election campaign and Republican contender Mitt Romney’s campaign have adopted the latest tool in political fundraising: Square.  Square allows just about anyone, including campaigns, to accept donations from mobile phones (specifically smart phones).

More than that, though, Square could be a game changer as it allows campaigns to give workers and volunteers their own Square app that ties in with the main campaign app, thus making mobile armies of contribution collectors.  These people can each individually collect donations for the campaign, automatically keeping proper records, and have the money immediately added to the main campaign Square account.

This means that the individual campaigner for the candidate has no access to the information or money while allowing them to collect on behalf of the campaign safely.

Although in terms of dollar percentages, this tool is not likely to be significant in the monies raised this year, it is a potential game-changer for now and in the future as politics surges ahead with tech.  More than that, though, it creates huge possibilities for the grassroots candidate who may have a glut of manpower in the campaign, but be short on capital contributions.  Turning an army of volunteers into a mobile contribution solicitation service can mean a lot to a small campaign that would otherwise have little chance.

So while social marketing via social networks may be the huge thing for 2012, this new way of collecting contributions will likely be something that shapes mid-term elections in 2013 and beyond.

Earlier this month, Facebook launched its Open Graph tools to allow app developers to more easily share user activity data across timelines and on their own sites for integration.  While controversial, as the usual privacy concerns were aired, the tools have been utilized in some interesting ways.  Here’s a few of them.

Fab.com’s $10 monthly credit for opt-ins. This is really cool.  Usually, your data is seen as a free-for-all by companies and Facebook itself.  Fab.com, however, is rewarding users for opting in to shar etheir shopping data with them.  For the next five months, Fab pays $10 a month in credits to users who opt into their Facebook social shopping app.  The company has also added little nuances that use the tool in other interesting ways, such as hiding purchases when they’re called “gifts” in the timeline so the person its for won’t see it in on your profile.

Ticketmaster product finding. Rather than throwing out random ads at people in hopes a percentage of them want to actually buy tickets to see the artist or event being promoted, Ticketmaster has come up with a way to watch opt-in users’ streams to offer ads related to what they’re talking about or using.  Listening to that new band on Spotify?  If they’re coming to your area, Ticketmaster will offer you tickets to the show.  Nicks fan living in Texas?  No prob, when they come to town, you can get seats on the proper side of the stadium.

There are a lot of other apps out there now, but most are doing what you’d expect them to do.  Zynga is basically self-promoting by watching the games people play or talk about and mentioning similar titles of their own.  More will be coming as Facebook speeds up the approval process.

Chevrolet has announced that during Super Bowl XLVI, they will be running a “Play to Win” game on their interactive Chevy App.  The app itself ties in with a special Chevrolet Twitter account and allows participants to interact live with other SBXLVI fans as well as participate in trivia and game-based polls to try to win one of 20 cars being given away as prizes.

The Chevy Game Time App is available free in the Android and iTunes markets as of yesterday (Jan. 22).

Other prizes will include tires and accessories from Bridgestone, Motorola phones, National Football League (NFL) gear, Papa John’s pizza, and Sirius XM.  This is the first time Chevrolet has tried to implement a large-scale app for smart phones with this kind of interaction.

“This is the first time any company has attempted such a large-scale app,” says Joel Ewanick, global chief marketing officer for General Motors.

The games begin as soon as the app is loaded, though most of the big prizes will be given immediately before, during, and after the big game.  The first thing the app does is give the user a unique license plate.  If that plate appears in any GM commercial (both during broadcast and online) during the Super Bowl, then you’ve won a car.

Trivia questions revolve around players, teams, commercials aired during the game, the game itself, etc.  Correct answers get you entered into drawings to win prizes.

This is very cool and a first of its kind, so it will be interesting to see how well it plays out and how popular it is.

Saturday night, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who’s new to Twitter and may not fully understand how permanent tweets can be and how broadly they can be distributed (which may, ultimately, be part of his problem – more on that in a minute) posted a barrage of accusations in 140 or less against President Obama and Google.

The gist of those tweets?  Murdoch is a huge supporter of the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) and accused the president of selling out to Silicon Valley money.  He then accused Google of being the world’s largest pirate enabler and of profiting from advertising sold alongside pirated content.  You can see Murdoch’s full list of tweets at this link.

Google, of course, responded by denying the accusations made against them and pointed out the millions of dollars they’ve spent and the man hours given by their company to stop piracy.  Without government legislation, it should be added.

The president, given he dignity of the office, probably won’t bother responding to these lame 140-or-less tirades from Murdoch.  If Obama does, I think it should be via a simple blog post that is then syndicated via Twitter.  Just to show Mr. Murdoch how it should be done.

Murdoch, for his part, has shown that he has a poor grasp of how social media works.  Sitting with your iPad and typing a barrage of tweets is.. well, not the right way to do it.  Twitter is meant for a quick exchange of ideas.  Those ideas, however, need to be expressed in one tweet – two at the very most.  Each tweet should stand alone and not require the tweets before it to be involved in the understanding of the micro-blog’s content.

In other words, Murdoch is doing it wrong.  His SOPA-endorsing tweets should have been compiled into a blog post and then the gist of that post plus a link tweeted instead.

In short, Murdoch has proven that the reason people like him support SOPA is that they are ignorant of how technology works.  I realize that piracy affects the bottom line of everyone in media – including myself, in fact – but it’s not something that can be dealt with with sweeping legislation that is poorly worded and which will dramatically change the Internet for the worse by stifling people’s use of it.

I would submit that if more media moguls like Murdoch were to embrace the Internet rather than try to fight it, they would be able to capture more revenue from it than they stood to lose from piracy.

On February 8-9 in San Francisco, California, a conference bringing together today’s leading developers of social and mobile apps will be held.  Inside Social Apps is a two-day summit on the future of app and game growth on social and mobile platforms.

Presenters include Tim Chang of the Mayfield Fund, Daniel Terry of Pocket Gems, David Glazer of Google+, Barry Cottle of EA Interactive, as well as representatives from Facebook, Disney Interactive, and many more.  A couple of dozen in total, in fact.

The event is two full days of critical discussion and is being produced by Inside Network.  The agenda is robust and includes:

• Facebook, Apple, Google – Which Platform(s) Hold the Most Opportunity in 2012
• The Facebook Platform Roadmap in 2012
• Monetizing Social Games on Facebook: Credits, Today and Tomorrow
• Social Apps for Marketers and Brands: Maximizing Audience Engagement
• Cutting Edge Mobile App Development: iOS, Android and HTML5
• Social Game Marketing and Performance Advertising on Facebook
• Monetizing Mobile Games on iOS and Android
• Investing in Mobile and Social Apps: Risks and Opportunities in 2012

Rates are held until January 31 for both days or a single day’s attendance.  Given some of the big names involved, it will definitely be a great networking opportunity for startups and entrepreneurs.

In fact, the admission price is worth just that opportunity alone.

Find out more at Inside Social Apps 2012.

As the world moves into the future and we along with it, technology continues to become a bigger and bigger part of our lives.  For many of us, technology is literally with us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  We carry our iPhones, iPods, smart phones, tablets; we have DVD, DVR, desktops, laptops, our cars are connected, our houses are filled with WiFi, and we RSVP our children’s play dates using Facebook apps…

Yet most of us know little about how all this technology works.  Let alone how to make it do stuff for us that might not have been what was intended.  In today’s world, learning how to hack can actually get us further in life than earning an MBA.

So why not learn to code?

It’s not nearly as difficult as people might think.  We seem to think of programming as some kind of complex mathematical thing that only pale-faced, geeky types can learn.  The reality is that only certain types of coding are that way.  Most of it, like the stuff used to make websites look cool, to make blogs do fun stuff, or make nifty little apps for your phone, isn’t that geeky.  You just need to know how it works and the basics of coding to do fun things.

Most programmers and developers actually learn to code on their own – for many, the programming classes they took in college were more like refresher courses.  A few really good coders I know actually tested through all of their programming classes because they already knew it.

If you want to learn to code this year, make a New Year’s resolution, then head over to Code Year and get started!  More than 20,000 people have signed up already and it’s totally free.  There’s nothing to lose!