President Barack Obama, the politician who mastered social media in 2008, is a little late to the Google+ party, as Republican candidate +Herman Cain launched his page Oct. 27 and has 23K+ followers. But the +Obama 2012 campaign quietly made its first post this morning -- a welcome message -- followed by two more, one on a new law and one with a behind-the-scenes video.

Obama's verified profile also includes nine photos but no videos (yet). Although the number of people following the profile is not disclosed [ we find that lame ], the page has over 1K +1s and counting.

The welcome post, which already has 59 shares, 176 +1s and 129 comments, notes, "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."

Multiple responses to that post have mentioned holding a Hangout. +Ben Schmidt, founder of a music events site, writes, "They will revolutionize voter contact." [ 62 +1s for that comment so far. ] Note: Cain has not held a Hangout, and he has only posted two photos. We're betting Obama will hold a Hangout before Cain does, and when that Hangout happens, Google+ will get hundreds of thousands of new users.

The Obama campaign's official twitter account [ 11M+ followers ] has not announced the Google+ page, and we noticed Google+ has not yet been added to the "connect" list on the campaign's official website.

In 2008, Obama raised over $500M online from 6.5M donations and 3M donors. Of those donations, 6M were $100 or less, and the average donation was $80.

As Netscape founder turned VC Marc Andreessen told the New York Times in November 2008, "Other politicians I have met with are always impressed by the Web and surprised by what it could do, but their interest sort of ended in how much money you could raise. He was the first politician I dealt with who understood that the technology was a given and that it could be used in new ways.”

During the 2008 campaign, 500M blog posts mentioned Obama, more than triple the number (150M) that mentioned his rival, Republican John McCain, ReadWriteWeb reported. Obama had over 118K Twitter followers while McCain had just under 5K.

SCREEN SHOTS

Obama's photo page shows campaign events as well as behind-the-scene images.

The navigation bar at the bottom of the official campaign site lists a number of social networks but not Google+.

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