POLL: Social Media Critical to Political Campaigns 2010 
Ten years ago it was enough for a gubernatorial campaign to claim they had a Web site (that was usually nothing more than static brochure-ware).
Five years ago, the same level campaigns needed to show they had started to dip a toe into a blogging capability on those same sites and at least give a nod to the concept of listening/responding to voters via the new technology.
In 2010, for campaigns it’s all about getting social. This just released survey by CALinnovates.org, a non-profit technology organization boosting access and technology innovation, shows how fast the modern campaign is moving to adopt Facebook and Twitter. Death of the :30 spot? Not for awhile. But the explosive growth and persuasive capability of the new social technologies will certainly make candidates and campaigns work a little harder than they used to and leverage more & different techniques than many of them would like. What the survey doesn’t discuss is how the technologies are forcing campaigns to re-examine every facet of their interactions with their customers/voters and the basic structure of the candidate/voter relationship. What was once a top-down, candidate tells voter where s/he stands model is rapidly evolving into ongoing dialogue among voters, candidates and other interested voices.
The TV spot won’t go away by this fall
. But the shift is on to a completely different and challenging communications world for campaigns.
