Barack Obama’s team has moved onto Google+ adding to Twitter, blogs, Tumblr, Facebook and Foursquare as some of the social media places you can find the president of the United States as he runs for re-election in 2012.

It has taken them a little longer to arrive than you might think (Ed Miliband’s team joined in September), but the Obama social media team has clearly been having the same issue as the rest of us are having with Google+. What are we going to do there that is different to what we do elsewhere in social media?

“Welcome to the Obama 2012 Google+ page. We’re still kicking the tires and figuring this out, so let us know what you’d like to see here and your ideas for how we can use this space to help you stay connected to the campaign.”

So far their are only a couple of video posts and about 3800 fans although by the time you read this that number will have jumped and probably give us as good an indication as any how many people are using Google+. Last we heard this number was north of 40 million.

So what should the Obama team do? If they do only one thing they should use Google+’s secret weapon. What you didn’t know it had one? It does and as a feature it could be huge.

The secret weapon is highlighted by the diminutive singer Daria Musk. A musician with a nice voice and quick fingers on the guitar.

She has used Google+ to attract more than 36,000 followers, which is incredibly impressive for a singer that most of us have not heard of.

What is more impressive is how she did it. She released a song called ‘+1 Me’ and then using Google+’s live video platform Hangouts she has been playing virtual concerts to  hundreds of fans and has a recorded a live album from this.

She has skilfully used Google+ and apparently found at least one of its raison d’êtres. Live Hangouts speaking directly to fans.

Rather than play lots of tiny support gigs and spend time on the road building her early career she has used Google+. This is something you can’t do on Twitter or Facebook as even using Skype it is only one to one rather than one to many.

The addition of Google Music and Google’s Artists Hub only adds to that from a musician’s perspective (her ‘+1 Me’ video is below). Clearly this means that Google+ is going to be the new MySpace. I jest.

Google has already said that all the candidates in the 2012 US presidential race have agreed to participate in live hangouts with voters on television.

But it seems that if the Obama team really wants to make Google+ work then it should use it to speak directly to activists throughout the campaign. Hangouts seems made for that as well as looping in appearances around the country to amplify the campaign.

The Obama team can use it for quick briefings and rebuttals and do these live. It could create a really interesting addition to the digital campaign.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_U-k27mYRSY#!