Social Media in Political Campaigning

The topic of the day is social media and how it affects political campaigning. Is social media the new paradigm? First of all, what is social media? Before doing extensive research, the first thing that popped to my mind when I heard social media was Facebook or MySpace. Social media is so much more than that. Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to communicate with people interactively.  This does not only include Facebook and MySpace, but it includes other mediums such as YouTube, Google+, AOL Instant messaging, and Twitter. Social media is a daily activity for me. Until recently, I did not realize the true power and influence of social media. It had the capacity to put the first African-American President into the white house.

Even politicians are falling into the social media influence. The power of social media can really be seen in the arena of politics and foreign affairs. So everyone here knows President Barack Obama, the first African-American president. Alex found some pretty crazy statistics on how and why President Obama became President.

President Obama’s victory has been deemed the “Facebook Effect.” The fundamental difference in President Obama’s and John McCain’s marketing strategy, is their usage of social media and I mean the difference is drastic. John Hughes, Barack Obama’s campaigning strategist emphasized the use of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and email. Comparing the 2, Obama had 2 million supporters on Facebook. McCain only had 600,000 supporters. Obama had 112,000 supporters tweeting to get him elected. McCain barely had 4,600 followers. Barack Obama had 97 million video views on YouTube. McCain only had 25 million views. The difference is pretty clear. Barack Obama at least doubled McCain in every aspect.  Obama also abused emails. Barack Obama has 13 million people on his e-mail list. With a click of a button he can contact 13 million people. The reason why it is so effective is because its a cheap way to reach a mass of people. 

Aside from using the more popular social media sites, he utilized different and specified interest groups too. He had profiles on Asian Avenue, MiGente, and BlackPlanet. These networking sites were geared towards specific ethnic groups. I am a Vietnamese and Chinese and I don't even have an Asian Avenue profile. Obama’s campaigning advisers made sure they did not miss any body. They even had an Obama Application for mobile devices. The application allowed supporters to send pro-Obama messages to everyone on their contact list. This is what I found most interesting. Applications are growing everyday in both the apple store and droid market. In my opinion, it is ingenius to create an Obama-application that promotes him. It is innovative ideas like this that made Obama become president.

I think that social media will become the dominant method of campaigning. Already 46% of people use web, e-mail, or text messaging for news about presidential campaign. In terms of video, 35% of America watch online political videos 3 times as much during 2004 elections. Its just obvious that more people are looking at social media mediums to get their political info. The increase can be seen from both the people and the politicians. Already, more than 500 American politicians have their own Facebook page. The election Obama is definitely going to be a mile stone to social media in presidential elections.

Some people are saying that the president might be decided on Facebook before the election in 2012. Just looking at Facebook, Obama has 20,708,235 fans. This is nearly 8 times as many Facebook fans as all Republican candidates combined. On twitter, Obama has more than 8,752,258 followers on Twitter. That's over 5 times as many twitter followers as the rest of the Republican candidates combined. that is quite a substantial difference in numbers no matter what way you look at it.


http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/94861/obama-and-the-facebook-effect.html