I personally think that President Barack Obama is a very smart man, especially during campaign seasons. Maybe I wasn't old enough during the other presidential elections (or any other for that matter), but I think his use of social media was genius. Politics always felt like this old, tired thing that only adults over the age of 35 seemed to partake in because it would "affect them more." I always heard of adults/people who actually seriously care about politics saying that the 18-late 20's demographic weren't going out to the polls to vote, and that it was baffling that they just didn't seem to care. Honestly, I think it was in a large part due to the fact that participation in the workings of politics was predominantly through mediums or channels that just didn't keep up with the changing times. The Obama campaign, however, used social networking tools to their advantage and ended up tapping into an underutilized gold mine of voters. By focusing their campaign around social media like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and etc., Obama was able to set the technological world ablaze with his promotions. Using social media and making it easy to partake in, the Obama campaign workers were not only able to use their own staff to do the massive national promotions, but they were able to get supporters to spread the world and multiply their following exponentially. The Obama campaign was extremely perceptive and innovative in going to social media, and the first to take full advantage of this foot in the door with the virtual demographic.
http://cs12.cs.qc.cuny.edu/~waxman/8fn_002.pdf
I completely agree with you. He did an extremely smart move with including the social world to his campaign. His tactics to get the younger people involved actually did work to his benefit. Not only did the younger people get involved in voting but the older people were introduced to a new way of life because my father now has Facebook and goes online to vote in various pre-election polls. It's amazing!
ReplyDeleteI also agree with this blog because Obama was able to utilize the internet to grab the youth vote, which proved to be the winning strategy for his campaign. Social networking sites like facebook, twitter, myspace, and youtube were invaluable to Obama's campaign and without these elements he may have lost his campaign to McCain, who did lose by a fairly close margin.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that even my parents are now adept at using social media and this could have been beneficial to the campaign as well.