In 2004, the Howard Dean campaign in the United States blazed the way in taking the election campaign online. Dean not only raised more than anyone else online, but more importantly also pioneered the use of the internet to gather and mobilise support both online and in real life.
Since then we’ve seen social media explode with YouTube, Facebook and similar services. Now Governor Mitt Romney, a Republican presidential hopeful, is using the internet to harness the crowd by calling on them to create his official TV spot.
Romney has made a wealth of video footage, photos and audio clips available on Jumpcut.com (a Yahoo! company) where you can easily create and edit the clips to produce your own “cut”. This move will
- help engage Republican activists with his issues — this could lead them to choose Romney instead of one of the other candidates;
- provide a platform to get out more aggressive messaging since Joe Soap who comes along to create a video can say things that Romney or his staff can’t;
- increase the number of videos being produced for Romney, which will increase the changes of a single one of them going viral; and
- radically increase the presence of Romney online — just because a video doesn’t make it on to TV, doesn’t mean it is lost; say they get 1 000 videos that each get 1 000 views, that’s a million additional people who were exposed to his message.
In fact, the strategy has probably already paid off. The only Republican candidates who I would have been able to recognise in a line-up were Giuliani and McCain. I had heard Romney’s name in passing but nothing more (here is a list of all of them). Now I know who he is and what he stands for. Well, at least I think I know …
The first one I came across ended with “Mitt Romney: We can do a lot better”
This sort of subversion should be expected and can hardly be avoided. It shouldn’t stop campaigns from engaging and trying to leverage their supporters. Regardless of Romney opening up this process, someone could have (and probably has) created a negative ad anyway.
In the age of cheap digital cameras, massive searchable media archives, online video-editing tools and free distribution platforms, campaigns cannot control the message in the same way that they may have in the past.
Welcome to Politics 2.0.
Techpresident.com does great comparison graphs of how each candidate performs judged by appearances on social media. Also see my article about the different platforms and forms of social media the’re getting into(http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/18/17234.html).
I still wonder, given that the last US presidential elections had 122,295,345 votes, how much impact something like this really has.
True, also that none of these fora are limited to US IPs, and of course, to the voting public. It was argued elsewhere that this a way for the people bearing the brunt of US policies (ie: rest of the World) to vote with their attention (albeit symbolically).
Some other good democratic things coming out of this is votojournalism, constant transparent monitoring of campaigns by voters/users.
I think the real impact is :
a) in galvanising volunteers for the campaign
b) involving more people in the democratic process
Of course, this is not going to change the game completely. After all, it seems that one Florida Judge is all you need..