A significant factor in putting Barack Obama in the White House was the brilliant social media marketing of the Obama for America campaign. The Obama campaign realized that social media was a primary importance, not an afterthought. The number of people the campaign reached on the Web was staggering: Millions friended Obama on Facebook and joined the MyBO social organizing site. By election day, Obama had nearly 4 times more Facebook supporters than McCain and twenty times more Twitter followers.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project April 2009 report The Internet's Role in Campaign 2008 says some 55 percent of all adults--and 74 percent of all Internet users--said they went online for news and information about the election or to communicate with others about the race.
So it's fascinating to watch Martha Coakley's campaign for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts basically ignore new media in favor of the old playbooks that elected Ted Kennedy to the seat.
Of course there is much more to the race: Politics and platforms and personal connections are important. But didn't Obama for America teach us that the Web has the power to push a candidate over the top? Obama also showed the importance of young people (whose communications of choice is digital).
Let's look at a few numbers. As I compare the morning before election day, @MarthaCoakley has 3,520 Twitter followers compared to @ScottBrownMA with 10,214 followers. Coakley counts 14,487 Facebook fans to Brown's 76,700 fans. Advantage Brown by more than three to one.
Living in safe, secure blue state Massachusetts, I always envied those from Iowa and New Hampshire who got so much candidate face time in Presidential elections. Now that I've lived through a tightening race, forget it. The robocalls are crazy! I get a half dozen a day! And the television commercials! Don't get me started.
At the same time, why is social media ignored?
The event section on the Coakley site shows a dozen or so rallies and nearly one hundred phone bank events in the three days leading up to election day. Yet there are zero Tweetups and zero virtual events listed.
Massachusetts is a hotbed of information technology. People here are plugged in. Most of my friends don't even use the phone anymore except to call the plumber. It is a college town with young people who don't have landlines.
On Saturday I learned that President Obama was to rally for Coakley in Boston and wanted to go. But there was no mention of the event on her Twitter feed at all prior to the event. Nothing. What about telling fans first? Recall that Obama announced Joe Biden as his running mate via social networking tools like SMS and Twitter before he sent a press release to the media. Coakley seems to be on Twitter and Facebook as an afterthought, an item on a checklist. The Brown social media efforts seem much more active.
I did make it to the rally yesterday. It was the first time I had seen a sitting president speak live and I enjoyed it. Hoopla was generated. Television soundbites were secured. It seemed to be a success.
But wait. Look closer.
The event was held at Northeastern University and sponsored by the Student Democrats. Quick. How do college students communicate? Facebook and SMS of course! Yet these two forms of communications played absolutely no formal part in the rally. The brochure that was handed out had no web addresses or social media sites. At the rally, Coakley fans were asked to vote. They were asked to volunteer at phone banks. They were asked to talk to neighbors and friends.
But were the many college students in the crowd told to talk up the Coakley campaign on Facebook, the college student communications tool of choice? No. Were people at the rally asked to tweet? No. Were they asked to join Coakley's fan page? No.
The Coakley campaign is underestimating the importance of social media and the new rules of marketing and PR.
John McCain relied on what worked to elect George W. Bush and he lost mainly because of social media. Now Martha Coakley is relying on the playbook that elected Ted Kennedy and she may lose because of social media too.
Follow David Meerman Scott on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dmscott
Who knew it could be over so fast for a Democrat Administration? I hope those 'Blue Dog' Dems who stalled healthcare reform choke on it...
One other lesson I've learned from two decades of campaigns -- strategists and consultants nearly always get too much credit for wins and losses. It's about the candidate.
The best way to do this is direct contact to voters by a living volunteer. Face to face is ideal but even a phone call is good.
What the Obama campaign did was use social networking to facilitate its GOTV operation not replace it. In effect allowing them to run a national campaign as if it were local. They scaled up the traditional grassroots campaign to a national level.
I would say far from e-mail or twitter the one big technological change was the use of "virtual phone banks" and this was due to the popularity of cell phones that allow you to call anywhere and in the US.
It all comes down to GOTV and education. For example MoveOn.org ran a virtual phone bank in order to call every one of their members in Texas to explain how the state's combined primary/caucus system worked. This was a key move that helped Obama get the nomination.
Its not how many twitter followers you have but how many of those followers are knocking on doors and making phone calls.
They may not have read that health care bill, but as various friends and friends of friends read bits and pieces and pass the horrors on to their networks, support falls pretty fast. For example, I've read had dozens of friends forward me links to Glenn Greenwald's column on Sunstein, and that's not going to make me very trusting of suspicious social media forum posts.
Top-down messaging campaigns and sock puppets on web sites aren't going to change that.
Social media is supposed to go two ways. When it doesn't, it dies.
You hit the nail on the head ! I unsubscribed for exactly the same reasons !
Social media does not win elections. Social media only allows for a message to be shared and exposed to more people quickly in ways the "traditional media channels" can not.
A bad message widely distributed actually causes more harm than good. On the other hand, a good well thought out meaningful message distributed strategically will create leveraged opportunities in the marketplace as media and news creates more media attention and news.
One of the items which is overlooked is that messaging (value of the content) is still extremely important. Wrapping up a poor communication with technology just allows more people to know that you are not creating value in the marketplace.
The number of Facebook fans is a good initial gauge for social media success. But the real question is how many of those voters received a message via the Facebook community. Left the Facebook community. And then moved to the website to get fully engaged with the "mini movement". And then, took action in the real world. That is the real number to track to know if "social media" is getting the job done.
The www.Barack20.com project documented this whole "multichannel" sequence during the 2008 campaign cycle. It is good to see that the political world is embracing the use of new media to connect with their voters.
David Bullock
So, on the right, he's seen as a fiercely partisan liberal who has bypassed democracy and shut out all debate.
On the left, he's seen as someone who is more interested in compromise than action and who has NOT rammed through needed legislation.
He missed a window in which he could have actually effected change by really forcing an agenda, since he was going to be painted as doing so anyway. He just conceded power by trying to reason with the right.
Separately, we're in trouble in this country if we judge our "leaders" by how many friends they have on Facebook or Twitter.