Victory formula: social media to social production
The frenzy of tweets on election day have capped an intense campaign on social media this US election.
Did social media help shape Obama’s victory, asks SEVANTI NINAN
This is an updated version of a column published in Mint, November 1.
The frenzy of tweets on election day have capped an intense campaign on social media this US election. After the excitement of the Obama win it will be time to dissect how much of a role social media and the Internet played in a closely fought election. Obama was being called the most tweeted about candidate in the swing states. And with people tweeting photos of their completed ballots, it certainly spelt using social media to demonstrate intense civic engagement.
If 2008 had Barack Obama showing the way and experimenting with online media, in 2012, both candidates took that forward hugely and devised new strategies.
While Mitt Romney, the Republican contender, set out early to emulate everything the Obama camp did with the new media in 2008, Obama has a lot more people working with social media for him this time (750 to Romney’s 87) and has demonstrated new uses. So, if he does badly, we will know that the new technology alone does not compensate for negative perceptions of a presidency, or for poor electoral strategy. We’ll also know that there is some merit in that lovely term used by Romney’s online rapid response director Leonardo Alcivar: vanity metrics. Meaning, if Obama’s Facebook likes and Twitter followers are several multiples of Romney’s, it sounds good, but will not really count in getting votes.
Scanning the data being churned out on social media use in this US election is educative, and politicians in India who have taken a shine to Facebook and Twitter would do well to imbibe some lessons. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube apart, smartphones were deployed. Both candidates unleashed phone apps on an unsuspecting electorate. But does it ultimately make a difference in terms of effectiveness if the Obama campaign sought to inform supporters of the vice-presidential choice in 2008 through SMS, and the Romney camp did it through a VP app in 2012? The latter just sounds snazzier.
In 2008, Obama used the Internet to raise half a billion dollars through mostly small contributions. The final figure for this election will be known only later. But politics over the Net is both a fund-raising and a marketing exercise and the final test is—does it get out the vote for your candidate? The Obama camp did two things: used social media overall to sell the presidency, and found a way to convert online media activity to on-ground vote-mobilizing activity.
The Obama White House is reported to have innovated endlessly in converting conventional political events such as the State of the Union address into creative examples of new media dissemination. The president also held Twitter “townhalls” where people could directly ask him questions, and some 70,000 questions came from followers. That presumably would count as “engagement”, a much-used term to describe what would, eventually, deliver the votes.
But the social media to on-ground transition (described in mutopo.com ) has been attempted in this election by using a dashboard on the Obama site, which is essentially an online organizing platform. It mobilizes people through all manner of online media to be available for on-ground events that will eventually help get out the vote on D-Day. This is what mutopo.com describes as social production. The dashboard has all kinds of tools, including a tool that you use to make calls to supporters, and a numbers tile that will show your specific contribution if you raise fund or call, or mobilize in other ways.
The president’s online re-election campaign has had its ethical eyebrow raisers. The New York Times reported recently that his campaign was resorting to data mining to target its supporters better, which simply means accessing personal information on Facebook to make a better pitch. You’ve said somewhere that you liked the movie Ocean’s Eleven? The campaign will get an appeal to you from its star George Clooney, who is an Obama supporter. Then there is the little matter of those campaign apps you download. They apparently sit around on your phone mopping up user data. More data mining.
One interesting media outcome of this election has been the effect of new media tools such as mobile phones on democratizing television punditry. People watched the presidential debates on TV and tweeted on their mobiles as they did so, so that opinion formation did not wait for the debate to end and the analysts on various TV channels to pronounce. The latter did not get to have the first word. The Pew Research Center says one in 10 Americans watched the first debate while also following news about it on their computers or mobile devices.
So, what could be the takeaway for Indian politics? One lesson is: don’t get started only at election time. Communicate with voters through mobile or online media even when you are not seeking their votes or money. Stay tuned to supporters all year round. Watch what you tweet, if you are Mamata Banerjee, Sushma Swaraj, or Shashi Tharoor because tweets surface at the top of search engine searches and may not convey a particularly weighty picture of what you’ve been doing as a politician.
And, find ways of connecting social media followers with ground activities, if Narendra Modi’s one million plus Twitter followers are to move beyond being just a vanity metric. But the man is smart, so maybe he is already doing that.
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