Perry: Campaign's Social Media Warrants a Book

Gov. Rick Perry, who has 52,000 fans on Facebook, said Tuesday that his 2010 re-election campaign's use of social media could make history.  

“Someone will write a story or a book someday about the 2010 campaign and our use of social media as a tool to reach a lot of people,” Perry told Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview livestreamed from the social networking company's new Austin office.

Perry said he didn’t understand the power of social media until 2008, when his campaign started gearing up again, and decided that’s where he would pour his resources. “We wanted to run the most forward-leaning … campaign to be able to reach people who historically might not have been involved in politics and being engaged in that. And we did it through the social media,” Perry said. “We were very, very successful.” 

When asked what potential fans of his Facebook site might find, Perry said they’d learn “where I rode the motorcycle last week, what I saw, what the running conditions were.”

“If you like dogs, you’re going to like my site,” Perry said, then quickly added: “I dig cats, too.”