How Social Media Is Transforming Politics
I'm going to start this way folks.. If social media ends up - as we all know - being another one-way advertising medium, like print, radio or television, and no doubt it is a game changer, so what effect is social media having on politics, or even in the election of 2012?
Mashable reporters uncover how the campaigns are utilizing massive stores of data gathered through social networks to better target political advertising, how crowdfunding could shake up campaign finance, and they meet the masterminds shaping the digital best practices for electoral politics. (Read here)
Four years earlier, Howard Dean had begun to reveal the power of the Internet for fundraising and organizing in his losing effort, but it was the 2008 Obama campaign that really demonstrated social media’s power to be transformative of the political process. But still, social media today was in its infancy.
The Twitter that Obama spoke to the day after he became President-Elect had around 5 million users, only a quarter of the total number of followers the President now has on just his own account. Facebook in 2008 was approaching 150 million users worldwide, a number that has swelled to almost a billion today.
A recent study from branding agency Digitas found that 88% of U.S. adults on social media are registered voters, and that over half will use social media to learn about the presidential election. It’s no wonder that in the campaign offices of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, digital strategists have been given a seat at the big kids’ table.
But, with all this, the Pew Research Center finds that the candidates aren't actually very social. “Neither campaign made much use of the social aspect of social media,” reported Pew in August. It seems that the campaigns are using social media as just another broadcast channel — blasting out partisan messages, and only taking very few opportunities to actually engage with fans, followers and voters.
So we’re just figuring out what it means to be social online. Why? Because political strategists are still in the early stages of figuring out what social media can and can’t do. So for now, no one knows what the future might hold for social media and politics, but still, social media is changing things.
Your opinion please?
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