Social media encompasses virtually all areas of a campaign nowadays. Campaigns can no longer dismissively relegate social media to volunteers. Republicans learned a lesson in the 2008 presidential election. If they repeat that mistake, they may as well change their symbol from an elephant to a dinosaur.
Political campaigns are gearing up for the 2012 elections and candidates are wondering how much in resources they should allocate to social media. Many campaigns rely on volunteers or scarcely devote any resources to social media. Even though Obama's defeat of John McCain in the 2008 presidential election was partly due to Obama deeply integrating digital strategy into his real-world campaign, many campaigns still shrug off the importance of social media, spending less than five percent of their media expenditures online.
Social media is taking over traditional areas of campaigns, from fundraising to media to volunteer recruitment and more. Some now argue that social media is the most influential part of a campaign. Its effect is difficult to measure, however, because it encompasses so many parts of a campaign.
Fundraising, perhaps the most important aspect of a political campaign, can be extremely lucrative online. Ron Paul raised over $1 million within 24 hours online. A recent study of the California governor's race found that the results of "social listening" closely correlated with polling and focus groups. Simply paying attention to social media – which is almost all virtually free – could save a campaign thousands of dollars otherwise spent on polling.
48% of 18 to 34 year olds check Facebook when they wake up in the morning. 65% of adults under age 30 cite the internet as their primary source for news, almost doubling since 2007. A full 34% of people ages 50 to 64 also rely on the internet for news. Twitter has become a better source for breaking news than any other news source.
Read the full article at Townhall
Yes, it is interesting that the world has gone from “for you” to “4u” and “laughing out loud” to “LOL” in such a short time. I remember thinking to myself some years ago that my mother-in-law, who was born in 1900, had lived in a time of change so moving as to eclipse any other 80 years of human kind. She was born with no electricity, no cars, no telephone, and not even a radio. When she passed in 84 she still had a rotary dial phone even if I had a PC at home and had been using computers for 15 years. Now I have to question what generation has seen, or will see, the biggest changes.
“More than one quarter of adults used their wireless phones to learn about or participate in the 2010 election cycle. Email is still important, but since people are so deluged with emails, it cannot be the only online method of communication.”
Yes, but what does this mean for the future? Where can humans go from Facebook and Tweets? I Googled “Most popular tweets” and got a buch of inane stuff with most of them having links to blogs or articles by major news orgs. This is certainly a meme, otherwise know as a mind virus, and the question is “Will this meme infect the world and change it or will it be snuffed out by natural imunity leaving only those that were not infected?”
I’m not infected BTW. I’ve deleted my Facebook and Linkedin accounts. But I love this format and the people at IC.
I was contemplating the effect of social media last evening. It used to be conventional wisdom that ‘pure’ democracy (Athenian Democracy) was an institution that quickly collapsed under its own weight as population density increased. The issue was citizen participation and the time it took to frame, conduct debate on, and vote issues. The challenge has always been the time frame involved to accomplish all these tasks.
Today’s connective technology removes many of these barriers. Social media, coupled with the 24/7 news cycle allows for anyone to focus an issue, research it and comment in almost real time. Unfortunately; just as our technological expertise has achieved the plateau where such ‘participation’ is possible we’ve also neglected teaching the aspects of ‘critical’ or ‘discriminative’ thinking to the point where our political system cannot take responsible advantage of the technological accomplishment.