Facebook, Are You Cindy McCain’s Pimp? Bang Who?

You know the morning routine (order varies by day).

1. Check email
2. Check phone
3. Check 15 social networking sites

Well, yesterday morning I was checking site number 2 of the 15 social networking sites as part of my current social graph activities. For me, site number 2 is Facebook. As I’m checking my friends’ activity steams, I noticed this little “gem” of an ad in Facebook’s lower left ad placeholder.

Aw, how cute? Imagine if this had been Obama’s wife. Hmm…Bang Mrs. Obama…

This weekend, I tweeted about the difference in Obama and McCain’s number of supporters on Facebook not reflecting what current youth vote polls show. The polls show the youth vote is near tied even though McCain trails with 162,599 supporters on Facebook compared to Obama’s 1,113,905 supporters (still wonder how many of those are real ppl). In my tweet, I also poked fun at social media not delivering in the youth vote polls even though Barack has nearly 10 times the supporters on Facebook. Maybe, in some cases, this “social media thing” really is about substance and not just numbers.

One thing of which I’m certain is this – if the ad had used Michelle Obama rather than Cindy McCain as the object, you would have likely already heard about this by now. At least a few of the 1mil+ supporters of Obama on Facebook would’ve seen the ad and tipped off a firestorm of racially motivated noise all over the blogosphere. MSNBC woulda ran this as a breaking tech news story and it would still be on the newscasters’ teleprompters today – k, maybe I’m exaggerating a little. Today, still not even a blip about Cindy. I’m guessing I’m the one who will break this “news” and you probably won’t hear about it again, unless I know you personally and we talk about it the next time I see you.

So, even if the larger numbers of political supporters on Facebook, or more generally, within the social graph, doesn’t translate to leveling the political playing field, it surely helps one with reputation management. More eyes always means more whistle-blowers.

Personally, for the record, Cindy McCain is cuter than Michelle Obama, but the ad was ridiculous and Facebook should police its ads better. So much for the theory of tuning out online ads as some ppl say we are conditioned to do now.