Objective of the study:
·
The objective of the study is to access the
impact of social media on US elections
·
The analysis does a comparative study between
the two important candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and how both of them
used social media, their strategies on social media and how involved they were
on the social platform.
·
The analysis also tries to give an insight into
how this analysis could be seen in Indian context and what kind inputs we can
take from the elections held in US
How much candidates posted online daily and how
many platforms they covered
·
The Obama's campaign has made far more use of
direct digital messaging than Romney's. Across platforms, the Obama campaign
published 614 posts during the two weeks examined compared with 168 for Romney.
·
The gap was the greatest on Twitter, where the
Romney campaign averaged just one tweet per day versus 29 for the Obama
·
Obama also produced about twice as many blog
posts on his website as did Romney and more than twice as many YouTube videos.
·
Obama's
digital effort stands out first for its scale on various platforms compared
with Romney's.
·
The Obama campaign had public accounts on nine
separate platforms: Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr, YouTube, Flickr,
Instagram, Spotify and two accounts on Twitter (@BarackObama and @Obama2012).
·
That is twice that of the Romney campaign, which
had public accounts on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Google+. Romney
has since expanded his presence, adding accounts on Tumblr and Spotify.
Focus of digital Campaigns
·
One of
the biggest changes in the Obama website from 2008 to 2012 was the ability to
tailor content and news feeds to one's location.
·
Target specific user group -Visitors to Obama's
website are offered opportunities to join 18 different constituency groups,
among them African-Americans, women, LGBT, Latinos, veterans/military families
or young Americans.
·
If you click to join a group, you then begin to
receive content targeted to that constituency. The Romney campaign offered no
such groups in June. It has since added a Communities page that by early August
featured nine groups.
·
The Obama network had a database of more than 13
million people, themselves connected, by Web paths easy to trace, to family
members, friends, coworkers, acquaintances and neighbors. The network noted
what all these points of contacts did, what they liked, what TV they watched,
what books, papers, and blogs they read. And they created appeals on all those
levels
Engagement with Citizens and Social Media Response
to Digital campaign
·
The Obama campaign's engagement with citizens
exceeded that of the Romney campaign. For the most part, however, this was
limited to the website, where such engagement was more carefully controlled.
·
Neither campaign created much public dialogue
with citizens in their social media channels. Neither campaign engaged heavily in the
"social" aspect of the social media-But the Obama campaign filled its
news blog with citizen content.
·
Nearly all of the tweets, posts on Facebook and
YouTube videos originated with someone inside the campaign or a well-known
supporter. Rarely did either candidate reply to, comment on or retweet
something from a citizen.
·
Many of the citizen contributions in the Obama
blog spoke of how and why they became involved in the campaign or shared
personal stories of how a particular policy of President Obama had changed
their life.
Issues debated and response generated on them
·
The economy may have dominated both candidates'
digital messaging, but it was not what voters showed the most interest in.
·
On average Obama's messages about the economy
generated 361 shares or retweets per post.
·
However Obama’s posts about immigration, by
comparison, generated more than four times that reaction; and his posts about
women's and veterans' issues generated more than three times.
·
The Obama camp directly engaged with his
follower base in aggressively connecting with them during Election Day. On
Election Day, Obama had three of the top 10 Twitter trending topics and Romney
none, which demonstrates Obama's dominance and helped shape voters perception
as well.
·
This was also true of attention to Romney's
messaging. His posts on health care and veterans averaged almost twice the
response per post of his economic messages.
·
But the biggest single video across all
platforms during the time period studied was that of Michelle Obama, Malia and
Sasha wishing the President a Happy Father's Day. That video was shared through
Facebook 2,265 times in the first 48 hours and viewed 211,663 times
Suggestive Strategy
·
Presence on all digital platforms required and an
IT team should constantly evaluate the strengths of each of the platform. For
e.g. YouTube could be used to pass some lengthy message whereas twitter could
be used for quick messages.
·
While it is an area of debate whether the
leaders should get directly involved in replying back to citizen comments definitely
user stories could be used to promote the policy stand/benefits on party websites.
The content posted should be such that it addresses the common queries and
debates going on the social media rather than automated responses.
·
Extensive database of users should be started to
be build starting today itself. Users inclined to the party could be evaluated
by floating party policy pages or such related content and users who like them
or retweet them should be tried to be contacted digitally and encourage them to
vote for the party.
·
Social media could be used to encourage young
citizens to vote by building pages as “IVoted” etc which will mobilize the
people supporting us (when a voter votes they can go and click on IVoted page
which will then act as a motivation to others in the circle). Youth follow the trends
and an appeal page on social media sites can mobilize this part of voters who
generally do not vote.
·
Young people will vote and US elections showed
how they could be mobilized.
·
Tailored content should be built to target
specific user groups. Such groups should be identified. Another important
segment of voters are the undecided voters, database of such voters should be
build and the subjects they are interested should be explored.
·
During elections teams should be focusing on
understanding which posts are generating huge interests and such issues should
be clearly debated and re-posted.
·
Social media reduced the significance of
mainstream media as users were getting the updates directly from the social platforms,
this could be used effectively by us.
·
The age group that is most active on social
media likes to see progressive leaders; an effort should make to build that
kind of image for our leaders.
