To get in the spirit for next week’s Kevin Sullivan presentation at JSH&A (Sullivan is the former White House Communications Director), I thought I would check out how politicians are using social media in their current and upcoming campaigns.
It’s been widely reported how Barack Obama spread the word to young people (more than 2 million people were passionate enough sign out of their usual stomping grounds long enough to create profiles on my.barackobama.com as well as following him on other social media sites) by using social mediums like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. It’s been said that Barack Obama gets the Internet and social media the way that Kennedy got TV. The day after his presidency was announced WhiteHouse.gov was completely revamped and far more user-friendly – something that would have been an afterthought for his predecessors. Notably, Obama used Flickr & YouTube to get IN on the discussion, rather than relying solely on our generation to listen to his points (smart).
In an article by Kate Gardiner for Medill Reports Chicago, she shares that many of the contenders in the 5th Congressional District primary race in Chicago have joined social mediums like Twitter and Facebook and are using these platforms to gain followers, spread their opinions about major speeches (President Obama’s included) and policy and more. Some maintain their own pages, while some enlist their staff to “ghost write” their content. An interesting piece of information to note from Gardiner’s article: Chicago has the third-highest per capita Twitter use of measured metropolitan areas…so it is likely to have more impact in Chicago than in a smaller city. We are also the third most-populous city in the nation … coincidence?
I’ll be interested – and keeping an eye out – to see what happens in these races, and to see how politicians quantify their win (or loss) based on their social media efforts. There’s almost as much research citing the impossibility of measuring and tracking social media’s effect on outcomes as there is about people, companies and politicians who use it to campaign, so it will be interesting to see how the media quantifies these races. Of course Barack Obama did not win the election because he had lots of Facebook “friends” – but it didn’t hurt his cause.
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