Because on December 21 last year, Facebook quietly added the ability to segment fans by region in the API it provides to analytics firms. Which means that social media monitoring companies like Socialbakers are finding all kinds of juicy oddities in the fan counts of major brands.

“We looked at airliners,” Socialbakers chief exec Jan Rezab told me. “For example, Lufhansa does not fly to Indonesia or Bali or Jakarta … but they have a lot of fans from there. And Pakistan is their number four fan country, and they also don’t fly to Pakistan.”

Twelve percent of Lufthansa fans are from Indonesia, Rezab said, and another eight percent are from Pakistan, meaning that a full fifth of the brand’s fans are from places the airline doesn’t serve, and never has.

Which isn’t exactly proof of fraudulent behavior or buying of fans. But it is a little suspicious.

In August 2012, Facebook estimated there were 83 million fake accounts. And the world’s biggest social network has already made attempts to cut back on fake likes and fake users, which resulted in some brands and celebrities losing over 100,000 likes in a single day in November, 2012. Unfortunately, the scammers have gotten smarter too.

Of course, not all regional fan discrepancies are automatically cause for alert.

Over half of global consulting giant Accenture’s 157,000 Facebook fans are from India, but the massive outsourcing multinational also employs 80,000 people in the country. And only 47 percent of Obama’s Facebook fans are U.S.-based — which helped him beat out Mitt Romney in the social media presidential race — but he’s a global political figure and has global fans.

Massive regional oddities can raise eyebrows, however.

Regional fan counts also reveal marketing realities and opportunities. For example, Rezab mentioned that in the overall gaming console fight for fans, PlayStation 3 beats Xbox. But not everywhere.

“PlayStation wins globally,” Rezab said. “But Xbox wins in U.S., Canada, UK, Australia … essentially all the English-speaking countries, while PlayStation win in South America, Russia, France, Spain, and Germany.”

Social analytics firms have only just gained access to regional Facebook data, and not all of the three million Facebook pages that Socialbakers tracks have been updated with the new information yet. But Thursday the company will be unveiling a new social power ranking of brands with the most U.S.-based Facebook likes.

“This is the first time where you can actually see the US ranking,” says Rezab. “Before, it was cluttered with fans outside the U.S.”

photo credit: striatic via photopin cc

But whatever the cause, Barack Obama is the the king of social media, according to a new poll by social marketing firm SocialToaster. Three-thousand of the company’s social media pros ranked the president of the United States as the most influential social media person of 2012.

The other top finishers were mostly entertainers and media personages:

1. Barack Obama: 50 percent
2. Justin Bieber: 38.2 percent
3. Lady Gaga: 35.3 percent
4. Ashton Kutcher: 32.4 percent
5. Anderson Cooper: 26.5 percent

In the same poll, SocialToaster asked the social media marketers who was most likely to influence them on a social issue. Social posts by close friends ranked highest, with 95 percent agreeing that a friend’s post was influential, while family came in at only 56.1 percent. Well-known bloggers ran a fairly close third at 39 percent.

Oh, and if you don’t want to be unfriended or unfollowed, avoid these behaviors, which respondents ranked by likelihood of defriending:

1. Racism: 73.2 percent
2. Sexism: 63.4 percent
3. Porn: 53.7 percent
4. Repetitiousness: 51.2 percent
5. Too personal: 39 percent
6. Poor grammar: 34.1 percent

Here’s the infographic:

But that might be about to change, according to Jeff Tangney, a serial entrepreneur who founded Epocrates, the medical information company, and is currently running Doximity, a Facebook-style app for doctors that is growing fast, with more than one in six doctors already on the network.

VentureBeat had a chance to chat with Tangney about the future of investment in the medical space.

VentureBeat: We don’t hear all that much about investing in medicine.

Tangney: No, health tech hasn’t even really been recognized as a category until the last 10 years. There wasn’t really too much venture investment in health tech, but that’s changing. With the passing of the Affordable Care Act and the recognition that health care is 18 percent of the U.S. economy … some VCs have started looking in.

VentureBeat: What will national health care do for the space?

Tangney: The first changes of Obamacare haven’t really changed all that much yet – the biggest changes are still coming up. In 2014, the insurance exchanges start at a state level. Until then, there’s a lot of uncertainty … which actually favors the venture community.

The medical community is not quick to change over time – venture community is the only one that can react that fast. For example, we just raised a $17M round a few months ago.

VentureBeat: What’s hard about investing in health care?

Tangney: Well, you see a lot of folks sitting on their hands due to regulation.

For example, it’s illegal for a doctor to send an email about a patient. It’s illegal to send an SMS. And the internet really isn’t used in healthcare. It’s a little like a third-world country … where they’re skipping PCs and going straight to smartphones.

Over time that will change.

VentureBeat: What is working … who’s getting VC in health?

Tangney: ZocDoc, HealthApp and CastLight are doing well. CastLight, which creates a very cool employer portal for lower health care costs, raised $100 million earlier this year.

ZocDoc, with does online scheduling, raised $70 million a few months before that. And PracticeFusion raised $34M round to help usher in electronic health records. We’ve raised $27 million at Doximity … so there’s easily $200 million raised in the last year.

VentureBeat: What do you see in the future?

Tangney: Investors who are focusing on health care are starting to place their bets … as soon as we get out of this regulatory uncertainty, things will start to move.

Most people don’t know it, but Sequoia’s biggest investment ever was in an urgent care center … MedExpress, about two or three years ago. They’re seeing this shift to insurance exchanges, where, instead of someone paying  $3,000 for treatment in a hospital, they’re getting essentially the same service for $1,000 in a small health care facility.

VentureBeat: How does the growing self-quantification movement fit into this?

Tangney: Well, I wear a Jawbone wristband, but the knock on Sand Hill Road is that no-one’s been able to turn it into a big business yet.

The question is: Where’s the cross-the-chasm product?

The hotbed of this is San Diego … QualComm has invested a lot, and West Wireless Institute has  put $500 million into quantification. They’re trying to come up with cool new technology that the U.S. can sell to the rest of the world … to the wealthy well.

I have a Sonos headband too. It’s really ugly, really geeky, and measures your sleep patterns. What I’ve learned is that to get a sleep score of 100, I need to be intimate with my wife first. [laughing]

Those are all cool things, but even Nike hasn’t been able to really crack this market yet.

photo credit: Viktor Hertz via photopin cc

This is a guest post by Corey Christiansen, Social Media Strategist for global digital marketing agency Metia. More details about him below.

If there is one thing that we’ve seen as a constant throughout the 2012 presidential campaign it is that social media has been the go-to-tool for engaging younger audiences and getting them to influence their friends.

There is a lot for marketers to learn from this campaign about engaging large audiences, managing reputations, and instilling passion. Here are the top five things we learned from studying the 2012 Presidential Campaign:

1. It’s all about engagement

Many of the lessons for brand marketers are the same whether we’re looking at presidential debates or some other event.  In an age where content is king, just having fans and followers isn’t enough. It’s increasingly important to know your audience and their preferred method of communication.

As you can see in the graph below, for this election, younger voters were much more likely to engage with political material on social networks (promoting and reposting political materials and posting thoughts on issues). So in order to increase engagement across social networks, it’s important to post content that resonates with this younger age group.

Bottom line:

In order to earn engagement, brands need to familiarize themselves with their audience and focus on topics of interest to that audience.

2. Passion is key to social media response

Social media data showed a lot of buzz and activity leading up to and during the presidential debates. Social media allows people to share their passions easily, and politics is one of those topics people are very passionate about.  In the case of the debates, users created their own hashtags, memes, and fake Twitter profiles in response to lines from the candidates. These spread like wildfire throughout social media channels.

Bottom line:

Think of ways to tap into the passion of your followers or fans in the social media realm by using a simple catch phrase or hashtag that can be easily shared within social media channels and include those in your ads.

3. Prepare your defense

Engage your audience when appropriate, but anticipate criticism beforehand and be ready to play defense. Brands tend to crawl under a rock as soon as they receive negative remarks on social channels.

This year in particular, both candidates have taken a barrage of negative comments on social media sites. In fact, Pew Research stated in a recent article that of all the platforms they studied, including blogs and mainstream news channels, the tone of conversation was the most negative on Twitter. As you can see in this chart from Pew, negative Twitter conversation about Romney exceeded positive by 42 points in the eight weeks studied. For Obama, negative assertions outnumbered positive by 20 points, though it demonstrated somewhat more fluidity from week to week.

Bottom line:

Be prepared to rally your supporters to defend your brand from critics and trolls when things get ugly.

4. Don’t forget the “human touch”

Scrutinize social media data for measurable insights but stay aware of the limitations. Sentiment analysis of social media data inevitably needs a human filter. No matter how well you train the software, it’s impossible to have 100% accuracy. (And most sentiment analysis tools actually assign a percentage around their estimated accuracy).

Bottom line:

Don’t forget the “human touch.” Read your users’ comments, post responses, and be engaged with the community you are building. This community will return the favor by sharing their passion with others. When it comes to data, remember that the machine can’t do it all. Make sure the sentiment analysis makes sense and adjust the numbers accordingly.

5. Don’t waste time and money by attempting to buy your opponents’ fans

While this may work well for some consumer brands, people searching for a presidential candidate on Facebook likely don’t want an opponent to be the first to pop-up in their search results.

Bottom line:

Just because you can buy search results, doesn’t mean you should. Confusing people into looking at your content is a desperate strategy to gain fans.

Were there other tactics used in this year’s political campaigns that marketers should avoid using? What other lessons can marketers learn from this year’s elections? Drop your comments in the box below!

About the Author
Social media simply doesn’t work if the content isn’t credible and doesn’t build a real relationship between users. Corey creates and implements social media marketing strategies that produce authentic relationships between consumers and brands. His significant experience creating, managing, and measuring online communities for brands including AT&T, Google, Microsoft, Reebok, Revlon, and T-Mobile has built an impressive arsenal of best practices, measurement tools, and success stories. As a social media strategist at Metia, Corey continually engages with clients regarding social business, building social roadmaps for clients, and delivering action-oriented research and recommendations based on real-world data. Corey received his Masters of Communication in Digital Media from the University of Washington.

Today as President (again) Obama won re-election to the White House for another four years, Twitter exploded, setting new tweets-per-minute record of 327,000:

Peak to 327k TPM following @BarackObama's re-election was by far the most-tweeted moment of #Election2012.

—
Twitter Government (@gov) November 07, 2012

That’s obviously a huge number, but it’s even bigger than you think. The previous record was only 116,000, set by the Spice Girls in their reunion concert during the closing ceremonies of the London 2012 Olympic summer games. And the record before that was Usain Bolt’s 100 meters gold medal, at 80,000.

In other words, Obama almost tripled the previous record, and quadrupled the now-third-place tweets-per-minute record holder. That’s significant.

Twitter sentiment analysis also shows the story:

At about 8PM Eastern, Obama sentiment rose rapidly to 89, while Romney’s dropped off a cliff to 18. In Topsy’s sentiment scores, 50 is neutral, so anything above is positive, and anything below is negative.

Re-elected President Obama also had the most-retweeted tweet ever, currently at 370,000 retweets, and 1.25 million likes on his Facebook victory status update.

photo credit: Comicbase via photopin cc

Source: CNN

Obama: more votes (that count) than Romney

Obama, whose mastery of social media has certainly played a huge role in his victory, tweeted simply this: Four more years.

Four more years. http://t.co/bAJE6Vom

—
Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 07, 2012

That tweet almost instantly became his most retweeted Twitter post ever, getting almost 370,000 retweets as of 9:45 PM Pacific tonight, and another 115,000 favorites.

And — unofficially so far — it looks to be the most retweeted tweet ever. Previously, the most retweeted tweet appears to have belonged to Justin Bieber, whose RIP Avalanna tweet has 223,376 retweets.

We said yesterday that although Americans were going to the polls today, social media had already chosen a winner. More fans: 32 million to Romney’s 12 million on Facebook. More followers: 22 million to Romney’s 1.7 million. And in the end, more votes … at least, electoral college votes.

And, of course, more positive sentiment as tracked by Topsy and Twitter over the course of the last year, despite a few bobbles today. That, with smart social campaigns that harnessed connected Facebook friends to get out the vote, has obviously paid off.

In direct contrast, the Romney campaign has not tweeted for more than six hours.

In addition, Obama’s victory update on Facebook — using the same photo — has 1.25 million likes and 170,000 shares in just over an hour. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess aloud that this is some kind of a record as well.

Regardless of which political party you belong to, that’s fairly impressive grassroots support.

Congratulations, Mr. President.

Image credit: Barack Obama

If you’re American, and you’re on Twitter, you may have noticed that there’s an election on. Twitter users have been seeing an avalanche of political tweets in past weeks as the U.S. election heats up. The recent presidential debate alone generated 10 million tweets, which makes it the most tweeted event ever in U.S politics.

All those tweets — and especially the paid promoted tweets — are translating into increased donations to political campaigns, says Twitter. To track exactly how political tweets influence voters, Twitter commissioned a study from Compete.

Source: Twitter

Frequency drives action

According to the results, Twitter users in general are more politically active than average internet users, being 68 percent more likely to visit Barack Obama’s or Mitt Romney’s campaign donation page.

But Twitter users — I refuse to say tweeps — who follow a political party, or who see political tweets retweeted by someone they follow, are 97 percent more likely than the average Twitter users to surf over to one of the party’s donation pages.

That’s good news for Twitter, which lost no time suggesting that, as Election Day approaches in less than a month, Republican and Democratic campaign managers and boosters buy ads on the social news site:

As Election Day approaches, the most efficient way to increase your campaign’s impressions is by utilizing our suite of promoted products. Contact us at politics@twitter.com to get started.

Another result in the study is that, unsurprisingly, frequency drives behavior. Twitter users who see more political tweets, were more likely to visit donation sites. Promoted tweets, which are seen more and for longer than other tweets due to their enhance visibility in search and on profile pages, could then be very valuable for political campaigns.

The two things the study did not reveal?

First, whether people who visited the donation sites actually contributed, or how much they gave. And second … who people will actually vote for in November.

For that, citizens are actually going to have to vote, not just tweet.

photo credit: Vox Efx via photopin cc

Before you vote, consider how much you actually know about where your candidate really stands on the issues.

On ElectNext, a startup launching at the DEMO conference today, you can take a free survey to discover where you stand on the political spectrum and which candidates are the closest match.

The survey has been refined over time, and approximately 2 million people in all 50 states have taken it.

ElectNext’s founders have firsthand experience on the lack of political engagement, particularly among young people. In 1972, over 50 percent of 18-to 29-year-olds went to the polls. By 2000, the figure had fallen to just 36 percent. In 2008, the Obama campaign energized the youth voter, but even then, fewer than half of 18-to-29-year-olds went to the polls, compared with more than two-thirds of people aged 65 or older, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

ElectNext is tackling a huge problem in a fun and interesting way. Register for free by signing in with Facebook or Twitter (don’t worry — it doesn’t post your political views to your news feed). It asks you to order the issues that matter to you the most, including health care, immigration, and education. It then prompts you how strongly you agree or disagree with controversial statements. At any time, you can peruse comments and discussion threads to get a better handle on the issue.

Ultimately, the goal for the site is to increase access to information and stimulate civic engagement.

Overall ElectNext got rave reviews from onstage experts at DEMO. “I loved it,” said Flite CEO Will Price. “Everyone gets that paper and goes through each initiative and ballot, and this is a great way to frame that.”

Price did caution that he would only consider the application to be ethical if it operated as a non-profit and didn’t sell user data or get data from partisan sources.

Cisco communications executive Sheila Jordan also loved the idea. She said onstage, “I thought it would be an interesting play to make it more mobile.”

Don Dodge, Googler and startup hero, said he’d also like the founders to think about giving users updates on issues between elections, as well. “If it did that, I would love this thing” he said.

Andreessen Horowitz partner Frank Chen wrapped up the reviews calling ElectNext the most compelling presentation of the day.

Keya Dannenbaum, founder of ElectNext.

“Big data is the biggest trend in politics today. Yet all the benefit of that big data is going to industry, not individuals. We’re here to change that,” said Keya Dannenbaum, the company’s founder (pictured, left). ElectNext’s founders have developed a political database and algorithm that can match users with their ideal candidate. 

Dannenbaum has experience working in politics at the national and local levels. She told me that in the three years she worked in campaigns, she observed a drop in levels of political participation and a sharp increase in the salience of the issues in people’s daily lives.

“When you ask people why they check out precisely where the issues matter most, they say it’s because it is just too hard to get good information and participate,” she said. Dannenbaum and her three cofounders want to change that.

Since its founding in 2011, ElectNext has raised $750,000 from Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, Comcast Ventures, and the John S. and James L. Knight foundation. Its founding team is in Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco.

ElectNext is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

We the people, in order to form a more mobile union, do establish that iPhones, iPads, and Androids are our preferred devices for accessing timely information. Thankfully, the White House has taken notice of our preamble.

Tuesday, the White House announced a complete overhaul to its mobile tactics; it released a new mobile web version of WhiteHouse.gov alongside enhanced apps for iPhone and Android that are also now compatible with tablet devices. The White House also published the source code behind its apps to GitHub so that developers can remix the apps for their own purposes.

“Over the past two years the number of mobile visits to the site has tripled, reaching 15.17% of total traffic,” director of digital strategy Peter Welsch wrote in a blog post on WhiteHouse.gov. “In order to meet this growing demand, we’ve relaunched the entire White House mobile program, making it even easier to see what’s going on at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.”

The fresh applications feature live video streams of White House events, photo and video archives, search tools, notifications for breaking news, and Facebook and Twitter sharing options. The new mobile code published to GitHub adds to the growing repository released by the White House.

The updates come just ahead of the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, and continue to push forward the message that President Barack Obama is totally with it and hip.

The Internet loves that the PODUS took to Reddit to answer ask-me-anything questions. The people also seem to adore Obama for establishing a mini brewery in the White House kitchen. The recipes for White House Honey Porter and White House Honey Ale were released to the public last week after much demand. The President even got a ton of retweet love for his photo response to Clint Eastwood’s quirky back-and-forth with an empty chair.

Photo credit: WhiteHouse.gov

The Obama campaign is employing a digital strategy like no other, betting more aggressively on Facebook, display ads, and paid search than Republican candidates seeking the nomination, according to new data from analytics firm comScore.

In fact, the Obama for America campaign delivered 835 million display ads in February, representing 86 percent share of voice for all presidential candidate display ads in that month, according to comScore.

“The Obama campaign outnumbered the combined effort of the four leading Republican campaigns with any notable online ad presence by a ratio of 10 to 1 in the past six months, reflecting a significant difference in advertising strategy between Obama and the rest of the candidates,” comScore said in a report entitled, “5 Ways Digital Media is Shaping the 2012 Presidential Election.”

The report, published earlier this week, looks at the digital media practices of presidential hopefuls. Obama’s approach — blanketing the web with display ads — resulted in 777.5 million paid ad impressions in January. Compare that to just 32.6 million paid ad impressions for Mitt Romney in the same month and you’ll see the disparity in display advertising strategies.

The digital exposure disparity between Obama and the Republican candidates carries over to social channels including Facebook. The Obama campaign delivered 22 percent of its display ads for a six month period on Facebook, where his more than 26 million Facebook fans went on to do the dirty work of social promotion for the campaign. In January alone, Obama’s flock of Facebook followers and their friends contributed nearly 66 million earned media impressions.

click to enlarge

“It is fair to say that on sheer volume of exposure, the Obama campaign is far outpacing Republicans in leveraging social media,” comScore concluded.

That’s not to say the Republicans aren’t trying to compete in social exposure. Likely nominee Mitt Romney, for instance, has invested heavily in Facebook, running 58.2 percent of campaign display ads on the social network during the past six moths, which is the highest percentage for any candidate so far. And Ron Paul is organically popular with Facebookers. The candidate attracted more than twice as many earned impressions on Facebook (30 million) than on paid display ad impressions (12.7 million) in January.

comScore also found a correlation between social supporters and actual campaign donors. Obama’s Facebook fans and their friends donated at a rate 2.5 times that of other donors, though fans donated less on average, according to the report.

A piece of legislation designed to make crowdfunding a legal option for startups will be passed into law as President Barack Obama plans to sign the JOBS Act Thursday, VentureBeat has confirmed.

The Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act has already successfully made its way through the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives, with some modifications, and will allow startups raising $1 million or less to let regular Joes and Janes (read: non-accredited investors) purchase a limited amount of equity in their nascent businesses via approved portals.

The legislation also eliminates the 500-sharehoulder rule, meaning that startups can wait longer before needing to publicly report financial data to the SEC and hold off on forced public offerings.

“On Thursday, the President will sign the Jobs Act,” press deputy secretary Josh Earnest said in a press gaggle on Friday.

News of the JOBS Act imminent approval started spreading on Twitter Saturday afternoon when Aol co-founder, Revolution CEO, and JOBS Act proponent Steve Case tweeted the revelation.

The entrepreneur-friendly initiative flew through the Senate with a 73 to 26 passing vote, and the revised law passed in the House with a 380 to 41 overwhelming majority. The legislation, popular with Democratic and Republican political parties alike, was already known to be supported by the White House and President Obama.

“The JOBS Act will help revitalize an IPO market that has suffered in recent years under the weight of market volatility and one-size-fits-all regulation,” Highland Capital general partner and National Venture Capital Association chair Paul Maeder said in a previous statement. “The passage of this legislation sends a strong and welcome signal to our most promising companies that the U.S. capital markets system is open for business.”

The tweet was sent today during Obama’s Twitter Town Hall live broadcast hosted by Twitter Executive Chairman Jack Dorsey. The event let citizens ask the president questions by adding the #AskObama hash tag to the end of their message.

The tweet, sent from the White House’s official account, restated the first question Obama addressed: “in order to reduce the deficit,what costs would you cut and what investments would you keep – bo”.

Admittedly, the tweet was a bit bland. You would think Obama and his team could have come up with something better, especially considering the event was announced almost a week ago. Obama’s second tweet of his 2012 campaign might end up being more interesting, since he won’t have a live broadcast consuming his thoughts.

Dorsey did a good job of keeping the conversation serious during the event. He avoided off-topic tweets such as “And now for the most important question of the day: #STARWARS or #STARTREK?” and instead selected questions that were more pressing. With NASA’s shuttle program nearing an end, someone asked about the future of the space program.

Obama said he continues to support space exploration, “but rather than just continue same thing, let’s invest in tech advances for the next horizon.” That next horizon, he added, could be in commercial space travel or a mission to Mars.

The president also spent time discussing the budget, small businesses, government spending and education, among other topics. The broadcast highlighted questions from a variety of citizens as well as a few higher profile Twitter users. Both New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and Speaker of the House John Boehner had their questions highlighted during the event by Dorsey.

“With 9.1% unemployment & “shovel ready” jobs a bust, will you admit the ‘stimulus’ was a mistake?” Boehner tweeted hours before the event started.

The entire broadcast will be available later today on The White House’s official website.

The Twitter Town Hall is the latest entry in Obama’s White House 2.0 initiative, which aims to make the White House more accessible via web services like Facebook and YouTube. Much like the Twitter event, the president has also participated in several Facebook Town Hall meetings.

Sandalow’s statement comes as delays of the Nissan Leaf and other concerns have fanned scrutiny of how the commercial viability of electric cars. Pike Research estimates that U.S. electric vehicle supply in 2015 will be closer to 841,000 cars. Sandalow made the statements at a meeting with the Society of Automotive Engineers in Detroit today.

The government released a report saying its the electric car supply in the U.S. will total 1.2 million cars by “conservative” estimates for 2015. The report doesn’t include key automakers like Toyota, which has the plug-in Prius planned for 2012, and startup Coda, which says it wants to sell an ambitious 14,000 of its electric sedans in its first year of production.

But the report projects supply of the Nissan Leaf in the U.S. this year to be 25,000 cars. By the DOE report’s account, 300,000 of the expected 1.2 million electric cars in 2015 will be Nissan Leafs, meaning the government expects Leafs to account for one in every four electric cars available by 2015. Nissan has to date only brought 453 leaf vehicles stateside. The company has about 20,000 reservations, and reportedly 40 percent of those reservations have become purchases. And Nissan seems to face a setback in the Leaf’s production every time it turns around — whether it’s a glitch in the system or a massive earthquake that stalls the car’s production line.

While General Motors seems to be faring better with production of the Chevy Volt — which will account for around half of the electric vehicles on the road, according to the report — the actual sales numbers this year for the Nissan Leaf will be anyone’s guess. But the Department of Energy seems confident enough — even though there isn’t any hard evidence that Nissan will be able to ramp up production to meet U.S. demand for the electric car.

Obama called for an end to oil subsidies and set a national goal of reaching 80 percent clean energy by 2035 in his state of the union address in January. The president also called for plans to have more than 1 million electric vehicles on the road by the end of 2015. Those two plans alone are particularly aggressive — given that renewable energy sources like wind and solar power currently account for a small sliver of total energy production.

Obama will have to reconcile his aggressive clean energy plans with a chain of recent disasters that has altered the landscape of the clean energy field. There’s been a lot of talk about the dangers of nuclear power after a 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Japan and set off a chain of events leading to a nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station. Wind power is also encountering some resistance due to a “not-in-my-backyard” mentality that has frustrated wind power companies to the point of halting production plans completely.

In his speech, the president focused on forms of “cleaner” energy like nuclear, natural gas and clean coal technologies. They aren’t exactly renewables like wind and solar panel but are typically considered to have less of an impact on the environment. Plans to promote nuclear power will likely run into a lot of resistance after the massive public backlash as a result of the nuclear disaster in Japan.

But natural gas surged lately, with oil companies making acquisitions and starting projects in the area. In a report last year, consulting and engineering firm Black & Veatch forecast natural gas would power 40 percent of the nation by 2035, while coal will fade from dominance. Natural gas is a fossil fuel that emits fewer emissions than coal when burned and is considered promising because the infrastructure already exists for it — although there are some concerns about its safety.

Industry watchers have remained largely bearish on the likelihood of significant national clean energy policy, which would stimulate investment and expansion within the country’s cleantech industry. However, the Department of Energy has a large loan guarantee program, which has supported wind and solar investments and recently awarded $405 million to three companies building biofuels refineries.

This is just the latest illustration of technology’s increasing importance in the presidential election. Both Barack Obama and John McCain have outlined technology policies, there’s been talk that the next president should have a chief technology officer (a position that’s part of Obama’s policy) and increasing traffic to McCain’s website is seen as a sign of his growing popularity, although Obama’s site still gets many more visitors. In fact, a user-created Obama avatar (pictured above) is a popular choice on Nintendo’s competing Wii console.

For a youth-oriented group like Rock the Vote, getting online is a necessity. Even if the Xbox may not be the best platform for informed debate — although I really like the idea of an Obama vs. McCain session of shoot-’em-up game Halo 3 — it’s good to see the group experimenting with new approaches to see what sticks. Rock the Vote also launched a partnership with MySpace last month.

And what does Microsoft get out of the deal? Well, there’s the novelty and coolness in allowing users to register to vote on their game consoles, even if that probably won’t attract too many new buyers. Also, the press release notes that Microsoft will be at both the Democratic and Republican national conventions, and not just to help Rock the Vote — the tech giant has its own legislative interests, namely to promote awareness of its parental controls and put a damper on calls for video game censorship laws.