For those not familiar with it, the Startup America initiative is an agenda developed by President Obama with Case that began one year ago today. The legislation intends, as Case put it, to “make it easier for entrepreneurs to start and grow businesses,” most likely through the benefit of small business tax cuts. In a statement, Case said that he believes this legislative agenda will “help to create jobs, boost our economy and ensure [the United States'] competitiveness” within the global economy.

Exactly a year ago, President Obama introduced Startup America and made a call to government officials and the private sector to support entrepreneurs working to succeed in a struggling economy:

Case’s full statement is below:

“The President’s proposed Startup America legislative agenda will make it easier for entrepreneurs to start and grow businesses and help us remain the world’s most entrepreneurial nation. I’m thrilled to see the President follow-up on his strong pro-entrepreneur message in last week’s State of the Union with this specific proposal for Congress. Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate have introduced legislation in recent months to improve access to capital, reduce regulations, and ensure we win the global battle for talent. I’m grateful that our nation’s leaders are now focused on entrepreneurship and coming together in a bipartisan fashion to help entrepreneurs start and scale businesses more quickly and effectively. Quick passage of the Startup America agenda will help to create jobs, boost our economy and ensure our competitiveness. On behalf of entrepreneurs all across the country, I urge Congress to make passage of this pro-entrepreneurship legislation a top priority, and get a bill on the President’s desk to be signed into law.”

Will you be a part of Obama and Case’s Startup American initiative? How will it affect your business? Share your experience in the comments below.

Before the first word is uttered, people are taking to the Twitters in anticipation.

BREAKING: Obama to Open State of the Union Address by Thanking God for Newt Gingrich #SOTU

— Andy Borowitz (@BorowitzReport) January 24, 2012

Obama announces at SOTU he is resigning to pursue dream of playing goal for the Boston Bruins?

— The Gurgling Cod (@TheGurglingCod) January 24, 2012

I just got briefed a little on SOTU, in a rare moment of outreach from WH communications team. Get some caffeine ready: thebea.st/AxCpF1

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) January 24, 2012

It occurred to me that watching Obama’s SOTU address is wholly unnecessary. He hasn’t had a new talking point in two years.

— Brady Cremeens (@brady_cremeens) January 24, 2012

If Obama admin. is so certain of re-election, why are they making HUGE, seismic shifts to the CENTER? Wait until SOTU. You’ll hear just how!

— Tim Palmer (@TheSalsa_Guy) January 17, 2012

Carney on SOTU: “There will be plenty of things within the speech that you will consider new and newsworthy.”

— Shawna Thomas (@ShawnaNBCNews) January 17, 2012

Don’t have time to watch #SOTU address. Can someone tell me later how much money I owe for the new programs that will be announced, thanks.

— Kenneth Gogel (@Ken_Gogel) January 24, 2012

If you’re going to watch the SOTU speech tonight and expect enlightenment, I’m willing to bet you believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy

— RodGermany (@RodGermany) January 24, 2012

Obama’s speech guaranteed to divide people into groups and pit them against one another bc he has no record to stand on #SOTU

— Brian Phillips (@SenLeeComs) January 24, 2012

Hang on, is tonight going to be as weird as last year? Who plays the role of Lady Who Doesn’t Know Where The Camera Is? #sotu

— Lauren G (@geeoharee) January 24, 2012

Experian Hitwise Director of Research Heather Doughtery wrote about the Facebook traffic for the presidential candidates this election season and found some encouraging news – if Facebook has anything to say about it – for one Willard Romney and company, at least insofar securing the Republican nomination. The traffic data only leads up to January 21, which was the date of the South Carolina primary so it’s anybody’s guess as to whether I’ll be announcing that Newt “The Gravedigger” Gingrich is the new President of Facebook after Florida’s primary next week.

Regardless, this is where we are now: Romney’s killing it on Facebook. Not only is his official Facebook page getting 1.7x more visits than Ron Paul’s fan page, his closest Republican/Facebook competitor, Romney’s page is netting 2.5x more visitors than Obama’s page. I know the line graph below is a little hard to see, but that red line that’s leaps and bounds ahead of every other line you see? Red is for Romney, and everybody else basically in the gutter looking up at his Facebook star.

If you’re Mitt Romney’s campaign staff and you believe that Facebook is in any way a valid reflection of people’s Real Life behavior and interests, here’s some news to send you to sleep with a smile: people making less than $30,000 are visiting your Facebook page a lot, and people in Ohio are visiting your Facebook page a lot. Why should this make Mitts happy? Because being poor and living in Ohio are two characteristics of the ever-important swing voters who would help decide a general election should Romney obtain the nomination and face Obama.

31.8% of visitors to Romney’s Facebook page in the last four weeks were reported to earn less than $30,000. Furthermore, visitors from Ohio had the highest share of visits in the last four weeks (Utah was closely behind Ohio in shares of visits but that’s Mormon country – Romney’s bread and butter – so that’s not surprising). Whether people just wanna get close with the enemy or are genuinely interested in learning about Romney, he’s pulling in some Facebook interest.

As Dougherty concluded, this is good Facebook news for Romney because it suggests that “social efforts are gaining attention and building an audience on Facebook.” This has been a crazy primary thus far, though, and who knows what the results of the South Carolina primary have done to this race. Also, keep in mind: this is not madness, this is Facebook; where people go when they need to post creepy pictures of their ultrasounds and share the latest frog/wolf/Asian father meme to their dubious friends. And since the third (more?) act of the Newtation is apparently really happening, so we’ll see how everybody’s settled on Facebook after the Florida primary.

You got it – First Lady Michelle Obama has joined the Twitterscape. A couple of subsequent posts gave some details as to what people can expect to see from her account:

Shortly after the account went live, according to Mashable, the terms “First Lady” and “Welcome to Twitter” became trending topics as the Twitterscape received Ms. Obama. In fact, she even got a special welcome from a familiar face:

It’s kinda cute, really, like watching two high school sweethearts exchange knowing looks of affection from across the classroom. People other than her husband also greeted her arrival today. Lots of notable Twitterers chimed in as people expressed felicitations while others, because this is the Internet, just had to be sour mouths about the whole thing:

Due to the breakneck recycle speed of the political news cycle, trying to stay informed on what’s happening in the world of politics can be nauseating. You’re probably always going to be me missing something somewhere. However aggregating your own collection of news sources doesn’t have to be so stupefying since Google has made it a little easier for voters and otherwise interested parties to attempt to stay abreast of the latest news concerning topics, candidates, and election results. Google Politics & Elections, a new wing of the Google News service, collects articles covering breaking stories related to politics in the United States. With the service, readers can isolate topics to certain candidates (right now it’s a bunch of Republican primary candidates and the current POTUS, Barack Obama) as well as issues related to categories like the economy, social issues, and healthcare. From the post on Google’s official blog:

The site enables voters, journalists and campaigns to quickly sort through election info by popularity, race or issues. People can also check out the Trends Dashboard to take the web’s real-time political pulse by comparing candidates’ YouTube video views, search traffic and Google News mentions. Campaign staffers, advocates and everyday citizens can utilize our tools and features to reach, engage and inspire voters.

What might be most interesting for anyone who makes a hobby out of political speculation there is a function on the Politics & Elections homepage where you can track trends related to each specific candidate. For instance, given the latest surge of Rick Santorum out of the bowels of obscurity and into a legitimate third place (the fact that third place is now a consummation devoutly to be wished is kind of absurd, really), readers can actually see the rise in Google News Mentions of Santorum in the past week. It’s a fun tool as an observer, but given how tumultuous this primary cycle has been for all Republican candidates I wouldn’t recommend placing any bets on the reliability of any search trends as proof of sustainable electability.

The Google Politics & Elections also employs the Hangouts tools for journalists who are personally covering the election, perhaps as an effort to promote sodality and collaboration but I anticipate it will most likely be used as an online watering hole where everybody commiserates and decompresses. You can add the Politics & Elections tool to your Google+ account, as well, if you’re interested in participating or watching any of the activity in the Hangouts. Additionally, you can follow news stories as they develop by adding this group to your Circles. The news service will also cover international politics as well as the home-grown brews but given that we are officially in the election year, expect most of the news to be dominated by the election of the next POTUS.

Since today kicks off the election of the Republican primaries with the Iowa caucus, following these services might be a good idea if any of you are hoping to stay informed as the results start to come in about which candidate will claim victory in Iowa this evening.

Ever since Cyber Monday kicked off the blitzkrieg of online shopping this year by becoming the most lucrative shopping day ever, the amount of money spent by shoppers has consistently trumped every corresponding week from 2010. In this year and last, sales steadily increased leading up to the big Day of Unwrapping (i.e., Christmas Day) with the penultimate week seeing a huge gush of money from consumers. I’d suspect that the week before Christmas is a huge shopping day for online retailers because those present-buying procrastinators wanna make sure the gifts arrive in time. This year, however, has seen a pronounced increase in money being spent for each interval that comScore recorded.

Increases in online retail sales have been observed to increase with each passing year recently so the fact that people spent more money this year than 2010 isn’t completely surprising. What makes this year so significant is just how crazy Americans went with their holiday shopping. It’s like everybody wasn’t quite content with merely spending some more money this year, so Americans decided that they didn’t like too many figures in their bank accounts and spent a lot more money. $6.3 billion worth of a lot more!

I guess some people think this is good news, but that more money than ever is being spent online raises an interesting question: given the tax loophole associated with online sales, how much tax revenue was lost in last week’s boom (and for the total $32 billion spent this holiday season, really). I’d like to see that analysis. I bet the different tiers of government want to see those stats, too. A loss of tax monies like that might not matter so much at a federal level, but that could have some heavy impact on struggling municipalities.

Anyways. So how’s your holiday shopping going? Anybody out there contribute to last week’s eruption of online shopping? Let us know with your comments below.

The study compares the tone of the discussion on presidential candidates across Twitter, blogs, and mainstream news outlets. Pew’s data shows that Twitter has been overwhelmingly negative in tone towards Republican candidate Rick Perry and President Obama while only going slightly less harsh on Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich (I guess not all of those Twitter followers for Gingrich are there to offer support). Compared to blogs and mainstream news, Twitter was a lot less neutral in how tweets discussed the candidates.

This probably isn’t a complete surprise if you’re a follower of several politically-inclined commenters, especially if you’ve followed trends like #tweetthepress, the trend that typically included ridiculing comments from people while watching the Republican presidential debates. From the study’s analysis:

One distinguishing factor about the campaign discourse on Twitter is that it is more intensely opinionated, and less neutral, than in both blogs and news. Tweets contain a smaller percentage of statements about candidates that are simply factual in nature without reflecting positively or negatively on a candidate.

Finally the new study found that the candidate conversation on Twitter is tremendously active-indeed the number of statements about candidates on Twitter vastly outnumber those offered in blogs by a factor of more than 9 to 1.

One telling detail about the Twitterscape’s discussion on the candidates is that, were everybody’s votes to be cast exclusively through Twitter, we’d all have to get used to saying President Paul after next November:

And in that campaign discussion on Twitter, one candidate has fared better than anyone else. Congressman Ron Paul has enjoyed the most favorable tone on Twitter of all candidates examined. From May through November, fully 55% of the assertions about the Texas Republican on Twitter have been positive-the highest of any candidate-while 15% have been negative-the lowest percentage of any candidate. That is a differential for Paul of 40 points on the positive side.

Paul is also the most favorably discussed candidate in blogs. While he trails significantly in the polls, and has received less coverage than every Republican candidate except Rick Santorum from news outlets, Paul seems to have struck a chord with some cohort in social media.

Paul’s expanse of neutrality in the mainstream media may re-enforce the opinion of many of his supporters that, at least in this case, neutral simply indicates that he isn’t getting any coverage. Additionally, the study does suggest that, yes, The Newtation is definitely happening right now given Gingrich saw his first week of more positive reviews on Twitter than negative in the week of October 24th.

While President Obama has been getting a rough go of it on Twitter with his “negative evaluations on Twitter outweighed his positive ones by 3-1,” Pew points out that he hasn’t received quite as harsh of an evaluation as his Republican cohorts have been dealt. Still, as with just about everything in this election cycle, these results can hardly be seen as predictive of which candidate the Republican voters will choose to run against Obama since just about every candidate this year has enjoyed the limelight of popularity and then disappeared into a dry well of near-obscurity. What you can count on, though, is that no matter what happens people will most likely continue to vent and complain via Twitter.

Unless it’s about Ron Paul.

The ads, primarily on satellite TV stations at the moment, are an attempt to recruit by urging viewers to call a number on the screen or visit the website JoinObama.com.

First ad: Building an Organization

I need you to do me a favor – it’ll only take a minute. The 2012 campaign is underway, and the outcome will depend not on what I do, but on what YOU do. Starting right now, call the number on your screen or visit JoinObama.com to help build our campaign in your community. It’s up to you to fight for the values we all share. Don’t sit this one out. I’d love to see you out there.

Second Ad: A Movement Starts With You

It starts with one person making a decision — that things need to change, and they’re going to help change them. That person finds another person who shares their values. They go out and find a few more. And before long, neighborhoods come together. Communities organize. A movement builds. It all starts with you, making a decision to get involved — because we’ve got SO much more to do. Call the number on your screen or visit JoinObama.com to let me know you’re in.

What did you think of the ads? Let us know in the comments below.

While at the Blogworld Expo in L.A. WebProNews caught up with Hugh Hewitt, of the Hugh Hewitt Show, and he shared his thoughts on social media, pertaining to elections, and the forthcoming Republican candidate nomination:

“We’re coming into the home stretch here with the Republican nominating process, even though we haven’t cast one vote. That means we tend to make our minds up much earlier than we used to and the Republican electorate is settling down to what I believe will be a Mitt Romney nomination. But, there is still an outside chance that Rick Perry can catch him. He’s got a lot of money and a lot of experience.

It’s a Romney / Perry race. If I had to bet the house, and I don’t thank goodness, it would be on Romney”

It’s no secret that social media played a huge role in the 2008 Presidential race, but what role will it play in next years? Hewitt states that, President Obama had an enormous advantage in 2008 and he ran rings around John McCain. John McCain was not an early adapter of anything… except courage. That’s not enough in a social media world. He goes on to say:

“If you look at team Romney they have assembled the best and brightest minds of the center / right of social media. A lot of people who are very experienced in driving a message below the old media horizon.

It’s very active, and it’s very netted up and you will find at least a match when it comes to ability and performance and probably a lot more sophistication. It helps to be in the opposition. The reason that team Obama was so good is they were all in the wilderness they did not except campaign. Republicans were governing. Now they have that problem and something to defend. That new media energy is on the right, and that will alway shift. The administration party will be behind the curve.”

The 2012 Presidential race will be interesting to watch and see how it plays out, and what new roles social media plays.

For 5 years, WebProNews has partnered with BlogWorld and New Media Expo, the world’s first and largest new media conference, in an effort to broadcast how new media can grow your business, brand, and audience. Stay tuned to WebProNews for much more exclusive coverage.

In the first post, the Obama 2012 team explains that they want the Tumblr to become a collaborative effort, one where people from all over the country can submit their experiences working for the campaign or upload relevant photos like one they captured of someone wearing an Obama shirt.

They also said that the Obama 2012 Tumblr would consider reblogging other Tumblr posts.

The Obama campaign foresees some issues that could arise from their latest venture, but have addressed the “trolls” in this fashion:

There will be trolls among you: this we know. We ask only that you remember that we’re people—fairly nice ones—and that your mother would want you to be polite.

Thanks, Tumblr. We’re looking forward to getting to know you.

The importance of social media in the upcoming presidential campaign is not lost on Obama and his team, as they continue to work hard to keep Twitter and Facebook an integral part of communication with the internet community. With Tumblr, Obama looks to expand his social media presence into a space that is yet to be tapped by many others in the race.

I’m sure that he’d like to see the kind of support on Tumblr that he has on other social sites – for instance his 10.7 million Twitter followers and 23.7 million Facebook supporters.

Since creating the Tumblr blog, the Obama campaign has posted a photo of campaign staff packing up cellphones in Ohio and made a short post about the President’s jobs plan.