Social Media is a Continuous Political Polling System
Obama’s first Oval Office address took place this week to update America on the BP oil crisis. The reaction and backlash from his short speech was quickly seen via social media outlets Facebook and Twitter. As Mashable reports, many users were unhappy with Obama’s speech. The article did highlight how social media has become the virtual water cooler for politics today. What is really unique about this trend is that political candidates and those already in office can have direct feedback with their constituents as they “fan” or “like” posts on Facebook and then tweet about them. Followers are likely to share their honest opinions via social media as well giving the politician a clearer insight into those he or she actually represents. 
Companies such as Twitalyzer or Twitteranalyzer have made it easy to get statistics about a Twitter account. Statistics such as how many retweets or mentions an account is receiving is available with just a click of a button. The disadvantage of social media serving as the new water cooler is that it makes word-of-mouth that much more important. Information can spread at a seemingly lightning speed because it is literally at our fingertips. If someone votes on a bill or piece of legislation that constituents do not agree with, it only takes a few seconds for word to get out and spread throughout the virtual world.
Google’s New Edge on Political Campaigns
Google is raising in the bar in political campaigns and social media. Today Google launched new tools for political campaign candidates to better engage the audience. YouTube’s You Choose 2010 Campaign Toolkit and the Google Campaign Toolkit rolled out today to allow candidates convey their messages to more consumers in a more effective way. They are revolutionizing online campaign efforts and jumping on the social media in politics trend.
You Choose 2010
YouTube’s You Choose 2010 Campaign Toolkit utilizes YouTube’s ability to create different channels for video posts. It includes the YouTube politician channel that is a home base for the candidate. There is a Moderator on YouTube that provides a debating platform for voters to interact with others. There is also a YouTube Insight channel allowing the candidate to see how their videos are doing in popularity as well as reach. YouTube is also providing addition features for those wishing to pay for their campaign toolkit. 
Such features include special promotional powers based on search terms. Consumers can search specific key words and when doing so, you ad will display on the page. If a consumer clicks your ad, you are charged but the advantage is through knowing that the consumer is exposed to relevant information making them more likely to view your ad. The paid toolkit also features call-to-action overlays to drive donations as well as a television ad online option that allows your commercials to air on YouTube and its partners.
Google’s Campaign Toolkit complements YouTube’s toolkit but also adds in the all-encompassing features of Google. Candidates will be able to use Google’s extensive application portfolio to effectively manage their campaigns. Features include:
- Google Adwords to customize the campaign based on consumer searches
- Google Apps to integrate communication into a shareable format for those running the campaign
- Google Maps and Google Earth to help consumers find you
- Google News to stay up-to-date on current events
- Google Analytics to monitor campaign performance
- Insights for Search to learn who is searching and what the are searching for
- Google Web Elements to add your favorite Google products to the campaign website
- Google Moderator to provide a voter debate forum
- Google Alerts to monitor what is going on and to email important news alerts
Political campaigns have already been gaining speed on social media but now that campaign managers can easily integrate all of their social media and online efforts into one system, social media is sure to drastically increase its involvement in the political realm.
Obama and Politics 2.0: Documenting History in Real Time
In July of 2008, Nancy Scola wrote a really insightful post documenting a critical aspect of the Obama Social Media Campaign – Video. Enjoy!
I’m taking a crack at liveblogging an event tonight [ed. -- now last night] at NYU featuring Arun Chaudhary, director of video field production for the Obama campaign, in conversation with Ellen McGirt, senior writer at Fast Company and author of magazine’s April 2008 cover story “The Brand Called Obama.” Arun left his job as an adjunct film professor at NYU to produce video that pulls from public events, behind the scenes, and one-on-ones — unique creative content that populates BarackObama.com and a YouTube channel. Let’s get started.
Asked about the new media team, Arun describes at least 50 people crammed into one corner of an office building floor with with “pictures of JFK and graph paper tacked up on the wall.” Arun says the new media team spends a fair amount of money, but they’re buying fishing poles rather than fish; the broadcast quality footage they capture, for example, can be used for advertising in addition to online video. Asked about past campaigns he tried working with, Arun says they saw media as “too precious” to take creative risks with.
Arun explains his hire by the campaign by saying ‘you can learn the politics. You can learn how to navigate these worlds. But you can’t really learn the trades very quickly.’ The campaign has been attracting successful people that way, he says, naming Facebook’s Chris Hughes, who came on to handle social-networking. Arun then screens a well-crafted mock movie trailer calling people to a rally in New York’s Washington Square Park that features Obama in slightly goofy situations. Ellen: “We’ve never seen anything like this before”:
Ellen asks if the technology was in place three years ago to make video like this. “The technology was there three years ago, but I don’t think the right audience was,” says Arun. Back then, he jokes, there were just six hundred of the same people commenting on political blogs and that’s it; online participation today spans a wider segment of the population.* Ellen ask how he managed to get approval for the trailer video from the campaign and the candidate. Arun laughs a bit nervously, “I don’t know if the candidate saw it,” but says that it made its way, he believes, to the level of campaign manager.
The next video was crafted to call people to the pre-Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa, as, Arun says, showing organizational strength was the key to getting attention and momentum in that state. Ellen asks if there was a concern that Obama and guest attendee John Legend were the only African-Americans seen in the clip. Arun pointed to the Internet Archive’s Prelinger Archives as the source of the overly white footage. (At the actual event, the video team had five cameras and five videographers in place capturing footage.):
Next video. An Iowa call-to-caucus piece, says Arun, is a campaign classic. It both asks Iowans to caucus for their particular candidate and educates voters on how to actually go through the confusing caucusing process. Both the Obama campaign and the Edwards campaign went the route of a dated instructional-style video, he says. (Arun praises the Hillary Clinton campaign’s call-to-caucus video which featured Bill Clinton eating a cheeseburger and saying something along the lines of “exercising is hard, but caucusing is easy.”):
It was the campaign’s “traditional media” team, says Arun, that whipped together a quick response to the Clinton campaign’s 3 a.m. phone call ad. But the new media team tracked down the young girl in the stock footage, Casey Knowles, an Obama precinct captain in Washington State. In the one-minute video, Casey deconstructs the techniques in the Clinton ad — the blue tint to the footage, the “scratchy voice” — and slams the “politics of fear.” An ad like that, says Arun, would never make on air, but works well online:
The candidate was in Terre Haute, Arun says, when the news broke that Obama had earlier made remarks in California concerning “bitter” Americans. Obama inserted a response to the incident in his Indiana speech. The new media team, says Arun, edited, packaged, and released the candidate’s own words within 19 minutes of the speech’s delivery. A lesson learned, says Arun, is that people are actually interested in the “sound blast,” and will watch long clips in their entirety:
He also cites Obama’s speech at their Chicago headquarters.The 14 minute clip shows the candidate addressing his staff, both in person and through a conference call (which creates a few minutes of less-than-thrilling footage when the call goes dead and Obama has to stall while it’s reconnected). It wasn’t deliberately shot low-fi for an extra dose of authenticity, Arun says, as some people suggested. There was no intention to create some sort of “Tanner 88″ moment. It was just, he says, that there was an intern manning the camera:
Asked by Emily about what an Obama administration might bring, Arun says that the role of video in an administration would be even more powerful than in a campaign. He mentions the broadcasting of health care meetings — creating a broader base of people who are able to keep an eye on the proceedings. The idea, Arun says, is not ‘telling people who tell people to tell people,’ but to use video to tell people directly. The role of video in governing, he says, is to achieve the goal of “cutting out the middleman.”
Q&A
Question: There’s a discontinuity in your work with high video quality and no sound mixing. Why?
Arun: We shoot as high quality as we can because it might be used for broadcast, but get used to it — a lot of the networks are going so broke that they’re getting rid of their “sound guys.”Question: What role with user-generated content play in presidential campaigns?
Arun: Using voter-generated content while probably remain “an unrealized ideal.” Much of the content that gets sent to them is “a little strange.”
Question: Why is new media going to make young people come out and vote?
Arun: It isn’t. Barack Obama is what is going to make people come out and vote.
Question: If you embrace an interactive politics 2.0, how do you avoid politicizing governing?
Arun: I think we’re ready for 1.5. We’ll [ed. -- a clarification: "we" here is a reference to political campaigns in general, and to the tools that might come into common use -- not a reference to the Obama campaign in particular] have virtual townhalls, for sure.
* Updated to correct: The original line referenced political blogs; in making the joke, Arun was referencing hard-core blog commenters.
Social Media & Politics
Web 2.0 gives birth to Politics 2.0
Here is a great post on the evolution of Politics 2.0 By Drew Clark
When it comes to adapting information technology, Washington is always about two years behind the rest of the country. So it makes sense that, finally, Web 2.0 is catching hold and gathering momentum here, in early 2007.
Washington’s political operative and consulting class has been energized by the early start to the 2008 election. And no one is ignoring the Web this campaign cycle. Call it Politics 2.0, and watch how it changes the media power balance when it comes to political discourse.
Consider YouTube’s YouChoose ’08, which last month launched its online channels for presidential candidates – and has 13 of them in a fortnight. Yahoo’s presidential election site is attempting to build community around Flickr photo-shoots of candidates on the stump. MySpace is likely to start a presidential space of its own.
Sure, every major candidate has paid lip service to glories of the Internet since 1996. Bill Clinton invoked the “information super-highway” and connecting classrooms to the Internet. Bob Dole clumsily mangled his campaign’s Web address during a presidential debate.
That was all window-dressing. Their teams – and their successors’ teams’ in 2000 and 2004 – mostly hired a few geeks to play politics on computers. The real campaigning went on in the broadcast television networks and in the pages of The New York Times and Washington Post.
That’s about to change. There is an energy about electoral politics and the Internet that is different this time around. Almost all of it has to do with maturation of software and social networking models that could upset the pre-ordained dance between candidates, media and voters. Already, we’ve seen John Edwards make YouTube a big part of his campaign, with others close behind.
To put it in other words, can Web 2.0 in 2008 truly displace the “MSM” as the premier medium of political discourse? Can the blogosphere bring down the mass-market media stage?
It could. Or at least it might. So says Joe Trippi, former campaign manager to Howard Dean. Sure, Dean lost. But Chuck DeFeo, who was eCampaign Manager for Bush-Cheney ’04, agrees completely with Trippi’s analysis. Now he’s trying to harness conservative backlashers – the people who do “not believe that Dan Rather was reflecting” their views – to congregate at Salem Communications’ Townhall.com.
Trippi and DeFeo were only two of the geek-politicos that gathered last week for Politics Online, the annual conference of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University. Optimism about the Politics 2.0 was high.
Even NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen, who predicted that candidates would use Web 2.0 technologies as a “symbolic gesture” but “keep things exactly the same,” was bullish on blogs and wikis. They would do for citizen journalism what his previous calling – promoting “public journalism” in an (unsuccessful) effort to get the press to focus on election issues, and not the horse race – could never do.
Also represented at the conference were the creators of innovative sites like TechPresident and PresVid.com, or “the YouTube Campaign.” Online strategies herald new voter engagement that will “make politicians more accountable, creating a virtuous circle where elected officials who are… less top-down are rewarded with greater voter trust and support,” wrote TechPresident creators Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry.
But if Politics 2.0 benefits smart politicians and engaged voters, who loses from this new turn of affairs? The mainstream media!
Indeed, the most entertaining part of Politics Online came from a panel that pitted bloggers versus MSM: Rosen and Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine.com and PresVid against Jim Brady, executive editor of the washingtonpost.com, and David Plotz, deputy editor of Slate (now owned by the Washington Post).
Plotz said that Web traffic shows that horse race is what readers want – and don’t “want to eat their vegetables.”
“Journalists are convinced that no one wants ‘issues’ stories,” countered Rosen. “I don’t think that is going to change. The wild card is all the people excluded by the earlier process and all the things they can bring.”
If there’s a king-maker in Politics 2.0, it won’t be the likes of The New York Times or the CBS evening news.
By there may still be an opening. Consider an off-handed comment at the conference by Eliott Schrage, vice president of global communications for Google: “We have reached out to all the candidates and invited them to come to Google, to talk technology and policy, and maybe even grab lunch. And we are going to put those videos up if we can, and if the candidates permit us, on our web sites as well.”
Is it possible that the most consequential media pilgrimage a candidate makes in the 2008 election will be to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, rather than to the mid-town Manhattan news rooms of The Times or the CBS Evening News?
Politics 2.0 – The Obama Campaign
Here is a good post from Pep-Net on Obama’s Social Media Campaign…
Barack Obama’s electoral campaign represents a masterpiece in online-campaigning. The use of ICTs and the creation of an Obama-brand were the key features to mobilising the masses. Obama’s opponent, senator McCain, couldn’t motivate as many people to participate in his campaign.
Barack Obama was registered on more than a dozen different social media, the main ones (Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter) included, and succeeded in forming an online community that strongly supported his goals. The online-headquarter was my.barackobama.com (MyBO) “[which] was at the heart of the campaign’s new media strategy. [… The] site allowed users to create events, exchange information, raise funds, and connect with voters in their area. MyBO was the digital home from which the campaign could mobilise its army of supporters.” [2] This portal helped creating a community with more than two million profiles. Of course, the easy-to-use website also attracted adversaries, which made community managers essential to evaluate and delete certain statements if necessary.
Citizens participate in Obama’s Campaign
The operators of MyBO established a strong sense of community as everyone with political interest could participate. In blogs, people could express themselves and report about their personal experiences during the campaign. Useful information, such as phone lists and guides for campaigning, were distributed via this internet-portal; even fund-raising-statistics of all members were included. However, the “real spirit of the community could be seen in the more than 200,000 offline events organized through MyBO.” [2]
The Obama campaign collected 13 million email addresses and sent one billion emails to mobilize its supporters. “The Obama team used email as an integral platform to engage supporters, bloggers, and online media. Often overlooked by traditional communications departments, email has one major advantage: speed.” [2] Putting email recipients into groups gave the campaign the opportunity to send individually designed messages to specific groups of people. An even faster way to communicate is SMS, which can be used to contact people without internet access, especially in rural areas.
Citizens make President independent
Obama’s blog was the centre where all news and information were displayed. “It was the hub that captured all activities in the Obamaverse and shared them with the world. The blog was the campaign’s repository, a place where stories, videos, news, and pictures were captured and pushed out to Obama’s many social network profiles.” [2] As people could participate, the campaign’s theme “Yes we can!” was emphasised. One of the Obama’s campaign stated goals was to involve people and to make them participate.
The fund-raising was well organised, and, instead of a few companies making large donations, many citizens donated small amounts of money. “3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. The average online donation was $80, and the average Obama donor gave more than once.” [4] Even though Harfoush states different sums, one thing is for sure: Obama’s success in fund raising is based on small donations by many people. As a result, Obama’s campaign was neither dependent on financially strong lobbies nor on his party. The campaign’s activities in the Web 2.0 made Obama become a one-man-party. “Without entirely realizing it, America elected its first Independent president.” [3]
The campaign was successful because it was both consistent and authentic in all the different media used. Despite the campaign’s uniform appearance, campaign managers created a specific concept for each online-platform. Citizens could participate in the campaign; feedback was wanted, appreciated and heard. In summary, many volunteers supported and influenced Obama’s campaign and consequently led to the historic election outcome.
Sources
- Rahaf Harfoush. “Yes we did, strategic Insights from the Obama Campaign by Rahaf Harfoush.” scribd.com, 2008.
- Rahaf Harfoush. Yes We Did. An inside Look at how Social Media built the Obama Brand. New Riders: Berkeley, 2009.
- John Heilemann. “The New Politics. Barack Obama, Party of One.” New York Magazine, 01/11/2009.
Jose Antonio Varga. “Obama Raised Half a Billion Online.” Washington Post, 11/20/2008.
Russian President Launches YouTube Channel
Barack Obama has it, Nicolas Sarkozy has it, Pope Benedict XVI has it, and now Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has one: his very own YouTube channel.
The channel is located over at www.youtube.com/kremlin, and its main purpose is to reach out to youth. Medvedev covers a wide array of topics: the first video on the site addresses schoolchildren and talks about good neighborly ties, while in the latest Medvedev talks about the Second World War and its outcome.
Interestingly enough, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin does not yet have his YouTube (
) channel, although he makes up for it by regularly appearing on Russian television.
Social Media Meets Politics: Are Politicians Embracing Twitter for All the Wrong Reasons?
The conclusion of our three part series of articles written by Jackson West of SF Appeal Online Newspaper. See parts one and two.
What few of these eager and ambitious men and women angling for higher office or their coteries of public and private aides have acknowledged are the real and current, or potential and future problems arising from new social media tools: ethical improprieties, interest conflicts and propaganda abuses are obvious consequences in theory and practice. Social networks and Web publishing make monitoring the majority’s public sentiment and mollifying it with a mouthful of rhetoric easier and more politically expedient than ever. “My job, and the job of all good journalists I think, is to put that message in context,” the Chronicle’s Audrey Cooper remarked when asked about statements and press releases issued by public officials.
Almost anybody who’s posted a significant quantity of text, photos or video online for an extended period of time has regretted at least one public revelation, and might have even deleted the embarrassing item from the public record (or at least used a Web site’s privacy tools to restrict access). Even then, deletions and access restrictions aren’t reliable, as search engines and other Web sites may keep copies which may remain publicly available, and motivated snoops can find ways around privacy barriers.
Elected officials are the very definition of public figures who’ve chosen to sacrifice their right to privacy. Obliged to serve the public openly and honestly, though constantly encountering opportunities for corruption through personal ambition and political gain, their choices between keeping private secrets or telling public truths (and lies) pits their individual interests against those of their constituents.
Shortly after the Cosco Busan freighter sprang a leak, spilling toxic fuel into San Francisco Bay, Mayor Newsom left on a planned vacation to Hawaii, assuring residents that he was in constant contact with local officials dealing with the environmental catastrophe. Yet after returning from his trip, Newsom refused to provide details of messages he sent or received while away — citing the use of a personal iPhone as reason enough deny access to records of any communication between himself and other public servants.
Presumably, the mayor updates his Twitter account from the same iPhone, or better yet, a newer model. But by using a personal device, he can not only avoid public disclosure statues by “co-mingles” both public and private business — also avoiding laws against using publicly funded facilities for political ends like soliciting donations and campaign support.
By the same logic, using privately owned Web sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, politicians can also ignore record keeping and public disclosure statutes while indulging in public business or personal promotion as they see fit. It allows the mayor to add “favorites” from his MayorGavinNewsom account to appear as thumbnails on his NewsomforCalifornia account, co-mingling purported city business with promotional efforts such as his campaign kickoff ad.
“The strategy of what they’re doing is have as little as possible go on their Web site,” explained online political strategy consultant Bob Brigham. Brigham is another Twitter user who was blocked from by Newsom’s account. “It was petty,” he said of the snub. Yet he defended the mayor’s use of the account for both personal publicity and public engagement.
“Some people would tell you there’s sketchy ethical issues, but I don’t believe [that to be the case],” he explained. For folks who ask simple, concise questions about city services, he felt the mayor was within his rights to answer as a sort of 311 operator by proxy. “Even though it is his personal account, with the way the world works, I think it makes sense if somebody asks ‘How do I get rid of my mattress?’ for him to point out large item disposal.” As an example, Brigham lauded California Secretary of State Deborah Bowen as “The best person in California politics of electeds on Twitter.”
Bowen’s Twitter stream is certainly personal, and the tone is certainly a familiar one for typical Twitter users. The updates on meeting schedules posted to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors account, with its strictly business mien, is tragically unendearing by comparison. But with Newsom, Brown and Villaraigosa, while it’s clear that the Twitter and Facebook updates serve their personal interest (namely, to woo voters in the hopes of getting elected), it’s not so clear that they are publishing updates themselves.
It’s not uncommon for celebrities and other busy people to hire someone as a ghost writer to manage their online media presence. Both Newsom and Villaraigosa occasionally make spelling or grammatical errors, which would be unlikely if written by an underling anxious about making a mistake. Yet Brown has help managing his LinkedIn account, some of Villaraigosa’s updates are signed DL by an aide named Daniel, and early updates on Newsom’s Twitter account were written in the third person.
The latter were probably handled by Deputy Communications Director Brian Purchia, who’s widely credited with maintaining Newsom’s Facebook profile and though working for the mayor’s office, describes himself as working in the “Online Media industry” on LinkedIn. And he probably has help in the form of interns who were solicited on Newsom’s Facebook profile. If not Purchia, certainly one of the nearly dozen staffers on the city payroll who work in the mayor’s office of communications are tracking activity and likely helping to keep all of Newsom’s accounts current.
So to some degree tools like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are being used to directly address voter questions and concerns, and also offer a little insight into the lives of our elected officials. But policies on disclosure and accreditation vary widely, and while it’s one way to reach a certain segment of constituents, many more are left out. And whatever public value it offers for conducting public business has generally proven minimal compared to the personal value for politicians chasing publicity, donor contributions and votes on election day.
Social Media and Politics – From Obama to Iran and Onward…
Here is a great post by Rob Paterson on Social Media and Politics – From Obama to Iran and Onward…
What is democracy? Is it just a vote every 4 years? Is that all the citizen has?
Who ensures that even that limited moment of choice and opinion is secure and trustworthy. How are the votes counted? Who ensures that the people have even voted? You don’t have to be living in Iran to wonder about that!
How does a candidate get chosen? In the west it depends on a party and immense sums of money. In other places, the regime makes the call. It is all but impossible to become powerful without having made a deal with the in group whether this is in Iran and the Mullahs or anywhere.
What might democracy become in the age of Social Media?
Could President Obama have gathered the financial and voter support in his campaign without it? I think that it would have been unlikely. Are most politicians responding to what happened in that election?
I don’t think so. For I think that they miss the point.
The tools of social media are just that. Tools!
The point is that to engage the people you have to have a cause that strikes to their heart. Obama had that.
What the tools do is to make a real cause too powerful for the status quo to push under the rug.
In Iran, people are risking and losing their lives for change. In the before Social Media times such as at Tianemen Square, the regime can and did utterly squash dissent. I don’t think that this is possible today if the cause is well enough supported. Yes, the regime can set up a massacre that may stop the demonstrations. But the legitimacy of the regime will be ended. Their only chance then will be to become a North Korea or an Burma – a true pariah. The story will not end there.
The tools and the supporting global community are enabling the story to be told. The world is a witness.
There is also another aspect that I see. Our response to the traditional media is usually helplessness and then numbness. We see terrible events but we can do nothing but feel bad. Traditional media is so one way and so passive.
But people outside of Iran not only know what is going on but many are actively engaged in helping or in providing emotional support. This was even true for the Obama campaign. Millions of non Americans became personally engaged in the election in a way not possible by simply reading the paper or watching TV.
The Obama campaign – but regretfully not the Obama administration – and the Iranian push-back – will surely be seen in retrospect as a Tipping Point in the evolution of democracy. What will happen, I cannot know yet.
But the regimes everywhere will have to take note. There is a line of self interest and oppression that cannot be crossed. For if it is, the “Sleeper will awake”.
The voice of the people is no longer restricted to the ballot box. No longer subject to the control of the ballot box. No longer subject to the needs of party affiliation or millions of campaign dollars.
I don’t know how this will play out but it sure sounds more democratic to me.
Social Media And Politics in Canada (4/21/09)
Here is a great presentation at Miles S. Nadal Management Centre in the Ernst & Young Tower of the Toronto Dominion Centre on April 21, 2009 to marketing managers on the use of social media in politics.
Social Media Solutions prides itself on being a “hands on” social media agency. Our team has not only a strong educational background in business development, but also has a multitude of real-world experience in designing successful strategic initiatives for global corporations and small businesses alike. Our staff will partner with your company to ensure the development & implementation of the best social media strategy possible. 
