You don't need a PhD in political science to understand the importance of social media in the runup to the US presidential election. It seems the candidate who wins the social media battle is most likely to win the election.
We saw the impact of online engagement as early as 2004, when the Democratic strategist Joe Trippi used online resources to build a base and launch the campaign of Howard Dean, turning the former Vermont governor from an unknown to a legitimate candidate for a time. That campaign later imploded, for a lot of reasons. Nevertheless, the groundwork was laid for future online campaigns.
That effort would come to fruition four years later. Barack Obama's online architects, Blue State Digital, helped catapult him to the presidency using social media, the campaign Website, and YouTube to make the candidate more popular and mobilize his followers to make donations and get out the vote.
But it wasn't just the Democrats, of course. When something works, both parties take notice. By the time Scott Brown, a Republican, ran his successful 2010 campaign in Massachusetts to take over the seat held by Ted Kennedy for more than 50 years, Brown's skillful use of social media, among other factors, propelled him past the highly favored Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley.
The day before that election, the author David Meerman Scott wrote in a piece for the Huffington Post that Coakley could lose, because she was ignoring social media. Here's how Scott concluded that prescient piece:
The Coakley campaign is underestimating the importance of social media and the new rules of marketing and PR.
John McCain relied on what worked to elect George W. Bush and he lost mainly because of social media. Now Martha Coakley is relying on the playbook that elected Ted Kennedy and she may lose because of social media too.
Scott was spot on. That brings us to 2012 and how the two main presidential candidates compare in terms of social media.
According to a report by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, a snapshot of the two campaigns taken in June showed Obama with a substantial advantage over Mitt Romney's campaign. But it's worth noting that the Romney campaign has taken steps to close what the report called a "digital divide" between the candidates. You can see a summary of the report in the video below.
Both campaigns have stepped beyond the Web and social media and have developed mobile apps to drive interest in their candidates. Both apps have iOS and Android versions and can be used to communicate with followers, raise funds, and more. Romney tried to drive interest in his app by using it to announce his vice presidential candidate this month.
Though the Pew report complains that neither candidate is engaging in dialogue with the voters, I would argue that using social media is a direct form of communication. The candidates can give their followers a message that isn't filtered by the news media. That's very powerful indeed.
At this point, both parties understand the power of social media, but if the Pew study is to be believed, Obama has a substantial advantage in the social media battle. Many unknown factors can have an impact on an election -- remember the October surprise? But if history is any indicator, his social media savvy could bode well for Obama on Election Day.
Came across this post today on MediaShift, which looks at the impact of social media on the election. The conclusion is we don't know yet of course:
"This leaves us to wonder -- is the election of 2012 the first real social media election? Are the voices and status updates a reflection of public opinion or simply a re-shared viewpoint in an echo chamber? Finally, and most importantly, given how closely social mentions track to the polls, can social media, finally, predict the election?
Whatever your view of Clint Eastwood's performance art piece at the RNC convention last night, you might be amused by the Twitter reactions from fellow celebs. Or you might not. Your choice: click.
@Kim: That's a very apt statement and one can indeed link the value of "dead souls" to fake online accounts for people who know how to derive value out of them..
Those with a literary turn of mind will inevitably be reminded of Gogol's Dead Souls.
Chichikov combs the back country wheeling and dealing for "dead souls"--deceased serfs who still represent money to anyone sharp enough to trade in them.
@slfisher: I won't be surprised to find out that there are companies that give you fake followers on Twitter and charge you in return. Seems like a pretty decent business model to have fake Twitter accounts and sell them to whoever needs followers :)
"But if they're just haphazardly put together just for the sake of the candidate having an online presence, then they can expect things to go wrong (like maybe going viral, for all the wrong reasons.)"
@sotheco: Completely agree with you on this. What you need as a first step is a social media strategy which translates into a social media campaign or presence. Without a proper strategy, things are very likely to go in a haphazard manner and may have a negative impact.
You're reading a blog, written by a blogger, so if most are written by functionally illiterate and read by zombies. I'm not sure what that says about you or me.
Keep in mind, too, that some people have criticized those apps from President Obama and Gov. Romney as violating people's privacy.
As far as Twitter followers, I recently got access to a new tool that helps detect fake Twitter followers and I was astonished to discover that Obama had a *lot* more fake followers than Romney did -- 29% fake and 39% inactive, with only 32% good, compared with 16/38/46 for Romney.
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The call (or, should I say, the Twitter DM) finally arrived. My Google Glass is ready. All I need to do is travel to Manhattan and fork over $1,500, and this piece of cutting-edge technology will be all mine.
When a new technology comes along, the standard reaction seems to focus on the most negative aspect of the device at the cost of all positive possibilities.
Recently, the Obama administration has been of two minds where privacy rights are concerned. On one hand, you have an administration that vowed to veto CISPA and mandated open data for government websites. On the other hand, you have an increasingly out-of-control Department of Justice on a fishing expedition at AP and demanding legislation to let the FBI wiretap private, encrypted communications and levy fines if a company fails to comply.
These days, even some usually techno-friendly people have their hackles up about the potential of Google Glass to surreptitiously record video or take pictures. I've heard more than one tech savvy friend bring up "the creep factor," the ability of a weird guy to secretly record you.
Marissa Mayer at Yahoo has come out with her strategy on turning the company around: culture, company, calibration, and compensation. But Yahoo needs to have a technical approach to the mobile cloud opportunity, not a management theory lesson.
Twitter's changes are clearly aimed at being more Facebook-like, and this is because both companies are vying to serve the mobile social network market. But can that market work for anybody, given how difficult it is to push ads to social-update readers?
The city of San Francisco is on the leading edge of using the Internet to provide government transparency. It is providing WiFi for its have-nots, and its DataSF.org initiative is putting the city's valuable data back in the hands of its citizens, with innovative results.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
Now apparently the mobile platform of choice, the Apple iPhone has benefited from its sound understanding of human factors and ergonomics – but is this reputation threatened by a looming avalanche of advertising?
Jeff Mirman, vice president of marketing at Turner Sports, discusses how his company turns fans and followers into engaged brand advocates through social media.
Apple's newest commercial features actress Zooey Deschanel having her requests for weather, soup, and music easily fulfilled by Siri. Nicole and Kim are putting those same questions to the test.
Big-data and analytics tools enable marketers to understand customers as individuals, identifying unmet needs and addressing each customer as a "segment of one," says John Kennedy, VP corporate marketing, IBM.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Monaco kicked into high gear today, and we've already begun to see news emerging from that lovely city-state by the sea.
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