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Obama campaign turns to Tumblr for 2012 race

President Obama's re-election campaign has opened up a Tumblr account to help promote the incumbent to people around the U.S.

Don Reisinger
CNET contributor Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has covered everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Besides his work with CNET, Don's work has been featured in a variety of other publications including PC World and a host of Ziff-Davis publications.
Don Reisinger
2 min read
The Obama Campaign has signed up for Tumblr.
The Obama Campaign has signed up for Tumblr. Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET

President Barack Obama's campaign yesterday opened up its first Tumblr account to help get the word out about their candidate.

"We'd like this Tumblr to be a huge collaborative storytelling effort--a place for people across the country to share what's going on in our respective corners of it and how we're getting involved in this campaign to keep making it better," the campaign wrote its first post on the page.

Currently, the Tumblr page has three posts, including an image of the campaign's Ohio offices and an excerpt from the President's address in Las Vegas yesterday.

With the 2012 Presidential election just over a year away, it appears the Obama campaign will once again rely upon the Web to carry its candidate back to the White House. Prior to Obama's victory in the 2008 election, his campaign doubled down on social networking services, like Facebook and Twitter, which many believe, was a key component in his success. In fact, just a couple months before the election, Obama had over 1.3 million Facebook supporters, alone. He also was the second-most-popular Twitter user at the time with over 56,000 followers.

By adding Tumblr to the mix, the Obama campaign has underscored how important the microblogging service has become. Last month, Tumblr raised $85 million in a round of financing led by Greylock Partners and Insight Venture Partners. Greylock said at the time that Tumblr generates 13 billion page views each month, and has about 30 million blogs. More than 10 billion posts have been added to the site since its inception.