Obama Campaign Launches Smear Debunking Site

The Barack Obama campaign launched FighttheSmears.com yesterday, in attempt to catalog and debunk the various myths circulating on the Internet about him and his wife. The site is a great PR move in a number of ways–by launching it, it sends heat back to the McCain camp which in the past has been anti-smear. It also allows fans to crowdsource and publicize the hoaxes themselves by using address book upload functionality common on most social networks.

While there’s nearly endless attacking through surrogates still left to do from now till November, this first-mover site adds a nice layer of web2.0 Teflon to the Obamas.

As of the afternoon, there were already over 500 unique articles about Fight the Smears.

The site was of course, immediately Rickrolled, and the MSM fell for it.

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.