Politicians Dive into Social Media
Introduction
Politicians are starting to catch on to the idea that social media tools provide them unprecedented access to a much wider audience. Twitter has captured the imagination of many politicians worldwide simply for the fact that it provides unfiltered direct communication to thousands of voters at any time.
Quoting Wikipedia, "Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 bytes in length. Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them.".
Using Twitter as a center piece, the IPDI (Institute for Politics Democracy ↦ the Internet) highlights a great use case of how Politics and Social Media are starting to work effectively together in their artcile Elected and Connected: Uses, Dangers and Benefits of Being an Elected Official in a 2.0 World.
Twitter & Politics
This is a watershed moment for political advisors and their clients. A large complaint by elected officials has always been about the "media filter", and how their message was unable to reach large audiences directly without going through the main stream press. Social media has finally made that possible.
Through Twitter, politicians have now been presented with a platform that allows them to build personal relationships with “followers” and earn trust amongst a community that only grows as you share more.
Barack Obama & Social Media
The most prolific, successful and savvy social media user in the political world has so far been the President of the United States, Barack Obama. His campaign made use of a plethora of social media tools including video and picture sharing, as well as existing networks like Facebook and MySpace to connect directly with a group of dedicated followers and voters.
The campaign mobilized tens of thousands of volunteers across the country to go door to door and campaign for the Obama election from the start in Iowa to the finish on November 4th, 2008. This effort was coordinated by an exceptional staff using and harnessing the power of the social web. The most striking result of the Obama campaign's social media advantage was the ability for the campaign to raise money from large numbers of people donating small amounts online.
The campaign raised a staggering half billion dollars via the web from 6.5 million donors. The average donation was around $80 and the average donor made more than one contribution. This speaks to the ability of social media to create and maintain trust based communities that encourage active participation; especially when this participation is guided and geared toward a specific purpose.
Conclusion
For politicians, social media is an obvious avenue in today’s increasingly decentralized and chaotic communications world. The problem, as old as the press itself, of how to circumvent media bias and filter, seems to have been solved. Politicians may not be the fastest adopters of technology, however with such an obvious incentive, it is important that politicians act quickly to embrace their followers through available social media applications and networks.
