No longer can a politician get by on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube alone. When President Obama showed the power and potential of these services in 2008, every politician and their chief of staff's mother jumped on the social media bandwagon. And in this 2012 campaign cycle, we're seeing the impact of this trend--not on the electorate but on the way campaigns are run in the digital era.
Candidates gunning for Washington today are seemingly addicted to signing onto every social media service--Tumblr, Google+, Flickr, Foursquare, you name it--in hopes of reaching yet another untapped pocket of tappable constituents. Take Obama, who yesterday joined Instagram, a service of just 15 million (global iPhone) users. Narrowing that figure down to domestic users, likely voters, and Democrats will likely significantly reduce the number of constituents Obama could reasonably reach (though he has already zoomed to 17,000 followers). On Google+, which he joined in November, Obama has been added to just a little more than 8,000 Circles. And on Foursquare, which the White House joined in August, Obama has racked up just 48,000 followers, a minuscule number compared to his followers on Twitter (11.7 million) or his "Likes" on Facebook (24.3 million). At this rate, don't be surprised to see Mitt Romney's dimples with their own Tumblr account.
The point here is that since social media became the campaigning tool de jour, candidates almost can't risk missing out on the next big digital trend, whether that's Instagram, Google+, or Tumblr. We saw this before in 2010, when high-profile candidates including Rick Perry and Charlie Crist joined Gowalla, the Foursquare check-in competior, which had just a few hundred thousand users at the time. Their campaigns unveiled candidate-branded passport stamps (or badges) that supporters could earn for checking in at events and town halls. Of course, Gowalla has since done a huge pivot and been gobbled up by Facebook, its potential dashed along w...
[Source: Fast Company]
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