Candidates for office in America have traditionally sent out regular campaign emails. If you wish to support a candidate, one way is to sign up to receive their daily, weekly, or monthly email updates. It’s a tried and tested method for spreading a candidate’s views efficiently.
However, this past presidential election saw a change in communication tactics. Social networking sites took an prominent role in influencing the minds of many voters. Emails and other methods were used, but Facebook and Twitter took the lead.
The Obama campaign had its own Facebook application. Users could share news stories, chat about events, and read posts made my Obama and his campaigners.
Twitter updates were fast and furious during the campaign, spreading messages and campaign information amongst supporters worldwide. These tactics proved amazingly effective.
President Obama and his campaign managers tapped into a new market. He was looking for people aged between 18 and 30. There may be social drawbacks in losing in face-to-face contact because of social networking sites, but they certainly work for mass communication.
Young voters in America are often apathetic about voting, thinking their votes won’t change much. Their cynicism gets the best of them, and they are a hard market to reach. However, they do know how to use the internet effectively.
Obama reached out to this important group of voters. Young professionals, university students, and other active internet users could all easily keep up with the Obama campaign. Regular Facebook updates, Facebook applications, and Twitter updates are easy to access for a generation that already spends a large amount of time on these social networking sites.
Previous great Presidents have all changed the way candidates campaign. Abraham Lincoln was made famous in the Lincoln-Douglas debates for a highly contested seat in the Senate. He used his speeches to produce a book. His increased visibility led to him becoming President. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had his fireside chats, that made campaigning more personal and relevant to the individual or family, instead of the masses. Obama was simply changing the strategy to fit the game.
Even now, President Obama is using technology to his advantage. All of his weekly addresses are put on YouTube, instead of just given on the radio. His Twitter account is still active and updates several times a week. Hundreds of Facebook groups have emerged, supporting him and providing places to discuss his objectives and policies. The White House even has its own separate Twitter account, as does Number 10 Downing Street.
However, as Prime Minister Gordon Brown showed during his disastrous performance on YouTube, the personality must fit the medium. YouTube works for Mr. Obama, but it certainly does not work for Mr. Brown.
Maybe our future Prime Ministerial candidates should take note. President Obama figured it out: if you want to reach the young voter demographic, use the tools they use. Obama was not only the first black President, he was the first Blackberry President.
Obama’s usage was certainly effective and ‘new’ (at least at a presidential level – it’s happened at state/primary level before) but more crucially it was holistic. For as much as the main parties and individual leaders in the UK have from time to time made use of new technology it’s almost exclusively for broadcast and not a two way process and rarely joined up to the rest of the campaign in a seamless fashion. It looks like it is bolted on as an afterthought because ultimately it is. If as seems expected a new generation of politicians is elected at the next election, with a younger average age, this will likely accelerate change in the UK internet politics.
I’m left wondering what sort of medium would be fitting for Gordon Brown’s personality. Perhaps someone else can have more success than me at coming up with something witty at 11pm on a Monday…
Jonathan: I think the danger of that request is not the lack of witty answers but printable ones.
🙂
JR: The problem with that argument and I said something of it myself is that it is as much in hope as expectation. Often as you get older your values and attitudes change…
The description of young Americans as cynical and apathetic about voting on the grounds that their votes make little change is interesting. I think that’s true to an extent, but as a young American – and one who does vote – I see the basis of our cynicism a bit differently.
It’s not necessarily that our votes make little difference – we all had civics and math classes, we know that one person gets one vote and how to work out the percentage of the population under 30. Rather, it’s that our votes, and everybody else’s, don’t matter. Whether the Republican candidate or the Democratic candidate is elected, the whole country is still going to hell in a handbasket – it just goes a bit slower with the latter, and in a prettier basket.
We’re actually quite bright – we know that as long as the “older generation” is in power, and the “older generation”-dominated parties are responsible for deciding who gets to run in the first place, it doesn’t matter who we vote for, there won’t be any change. I believe that’s the reason we don’t vote – why go stand in line for an hour or more in the 90° heat to cast a ballot for the lesser of two evils? (I personally went so that 50 years from now I can say I was part of history.)
Quite frankly – and perhaps a bit morbid – the reality is that we will win. We will get our way, and progress will be achieved. It’s inevitable, for one simple reason: We’re 25-50+ years younger. We just have to wait for the people standing in our way to meet their maker, and that’s exactly what we’re doing. It’s not apathy, it’s patience.
Looked at from a slightly different perspective, there’s also the argument that there are still only two ‘older generation’-dominated parties, and to cast a vote for any other candidate seems about as useful and effective as voting for Pigasus was back in 1968. The UK, at least, has more than two established options in nearly all constituencies — a vote might be for the least of three or four or five evils, but that’s more option than that presented by an either/or choice.
A cursory inspection of U.S. political history quickly reveals that while our system has traditionally been two-party (there are periods of plurality, however) the two parties have not been the same.
Neither of the original two parties, the Federalists and the “Democratic-Republicans,” exists anymore. The Whigs, who reigned in the 1830’s and 1840’s, are gone as well. It’s not until the 1850’s that one begins to see the familiar two names, “Republican” and “Democrat.” A cursory inspection of the planks in their platforms reveals that neither has much in common with their current incarnations.
Some, like the Republican Party, have gone a complete 360°. The Republicans started out favoring big business and giving away government lands, spent the early 1900s trust-busting and setting aside more land for federal parks than had been set aside in the previous 120 years, and now returned to their original views. The Democrats have done their share as well – they claim lineage from the Democratic-Republicans, though the old party supported states rights (code for a small federal government), believed in strict Constitutionalism, opposed a national bank, and advocated for the War of 1812. The current party supports big government, federal supremacy, takes a liberal approach to the Constitution, formed the Federal Reserve, and claims to be anti-war. My how things can change.
We don’t need more parties. Having two is bad enough – having five that can’t get anything done because nobody can get a majority on anything would be worse. A brief look at American history shows that each generation is more enlightened than the last, and progress moves forward. The generation of the 1850s and 1860s saw the evil of slavery and destroyed it. The 20s saw women’s suffrage, the 50s and 60s racial equality, the 70s women’s rights, the 90s the disabled. This is not hope, this is fact – I have no more need to hope that the sun will rise than I do that we will prevail.
It is true that values and attitudes change – that is exactly what the above examples point out. We will have our barriers too – while we will fight and win on X, those who come behind us will fight us and win on Y. That is how progress works – today’s battering ram becomes tomorrow’s barricade, but weakened by its own battering, it breaks under the force of the new.
Now is the time for us to wait for our moment – after all, “the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won.”
Perhaps it did work for Obama, but it hasn’t worked for Brown, and since Web Cameron has already been shown to be a sham, it won’t work for Call Me Dave either.
Webcameron was many things but it was not a sham. In fact, it was too successful, as you would have witnessed if you were a regular contributor.
The novelty of having a senior parliamentarian answering your questions attracted the larger lobbying groups, and it failed to put enough resources to satisfy them as well as the individuals who were the heart and soul of an interactive site.
Clearly, lessons have been learned!
Web Cameron was quite clearly a sham. I also don’t think it kind of you to insult me for not being a ‘regular contributor’. I have been reading this blog for a very long time indeed.
Do you really think David Cameron is the man protrayed in those phony videos? I don’t buy it and I don’t think most other people do either.
American youth have traditionaly not voted in percentages equal to other voters. Our political scientists would describe the elections when they do as “deviating” and the ones in which they are under-represented as normal. In America over many years the youngest voters today 18-21 could not vote in most states. They gained the right to vote but had many disadvantages in practical terms.
1. Parties contact mostly those who voted for them in the last election and by definition these new voters have not voted when they first vote.
2. Voters in previous elections are usually automaticaly pre-registered to vote. However, for those not so renewed the deadline to register has passed in most states before the big electronic media advertising campaigns are launched in a major election.
3. The culture had few fora for young voters and the candidates were not comfortable with them.
Obama probably(I do not know) contributed in a very modest way to the movement over the last ten or fifteen years to change things by passing “motor-voter” laws which allowed voters to register at the DMV. Having “rock the vote” campaigns for all parties (mostly the Democrats) and advertising the deadlines in other states. It is in this milieu that Mr. Obama was able to practice the art of actually getting youth to the polls. Then Senator Obama had a modest base of young voters from 18 to 25 that really would not have been possible until recently. That does not mean that his achievements are minimal. One has to see what is possible but the realistic possibility is something most of his predecessors could not have seen — it was not there.
President Obama figured it out: if you want to reach the young voter demographic, use the tools they use.
President Obama, I would argue, figured out that Twitter and YouTube and Facebook are only as good as the message put across them. Young people who have even a modicum of technological savvy are leery of older people who have plainly leapt on the social networking bandwagon without a clue as to what they want to do — it’s as obvious as the annoying relative who sends out dozens of e-mails a day and still hasn’t figured out that the chain letters and hoaxes he or she forwards are being automatically re-routed to our spam folders, if not blocked outright.
Social networking is only as good as what goes into it; good information delivered clearly and concisely is more likely to generate good secondary discussion than empty spin or verbless platitudes. And more than anything, President Obama seems to realise this — which puts him light-years ahead of a good majority of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic.
Croft:
I look forward to seeing the results of the next election, as well as how the internet is used in the months prior to the actual event.
JR:
I would agree that this a complicated issue. When you include the Electoral College, voter expectations, absentee ballots, and voter apathy, you can see why. I did not mention these things because of space constraints.
However, I have no doubt that young Americans are intelligent. I look forward to seeing the leadership that arises from this next generation.
Frank Wynerth Summer:
While Obama did benefit from some fortunate adverts (“Rock the Vote” campaigns, etc.), I think these things were a symptom of young people becoming more involved, not his specific campaign. MTV, VH1, and other television stations reached out to young people in advance, most of them without showing any obvious bias towards a candidate.
The real advantage Obama had was being able to relate to the very people to whom these adverts and campaigns were directed. Without his personal communication skills, the campaigns would not have helped him at all, and could even have backfired. He took advantage of available media and the movements already happening. Obama may have helped young voters in particular during his career, but this would not have mattered nearly as much as his ability to communicate.
Tobedwithatrollope:
You make a good point about the limitation of social networking sites. However, while they are still dependent upon the message being offered, Obama’s message was enhanced by using them. My point was not about the message itself, only about the use of sites like Facebook and Twitter. True, if his words had been empty, the social networking sites would have been ineffective.
As Lord Norton has mentioned in a separate post, it’s a shame that replies are limited to one riposte. Whatever.
@Kyle Mulholland
So you think 18 months is a very long time, you weren’t a regular contributor of Webcameron, and you believe someone dressed up as Dave on the videos. Have a chat to Lord Mandelson, I’m sure you’ll find a willing ear.