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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.
FROM THE BIG MONEY, SLATE SITE:
“The Financial Times is reporting today that its sister publication the Economist is trying to boost its social media presence. This means, according to the paper, having an audience on Facebook of at least 500,000 fans six months from now. Which may not be quite as hard as it sounds, given that it already has a fanbase of 180,000 or so. (It also wants 750,000 Twitter followers.)
How will it get there? It will spend, the paper says, “tens of thousands of pounds” in marketing.
This little nugget tells you a lot about where social media stands right now. Back in the old days—say, 2006—if a company wanted to boost its presence online, it would advertise or otherwise acquire readers for its Web site. That, theoretically, would be worth the money spent because as the publication increased its Web audience, it could charge advertisers more.
What the Economist is embarking on is far riskier. Because even if the desired audience targets are met, the overwhelming majority of communications that take place with fans and followers will not happen on Economist.com, but rather within the Facebook and Twitter environments. Yes, some of those fans and followers will click onto Economist.com, but will that number be large enough to justify the expense? Viewed skeptically, this looks like a direct mail campaign that doesn’t ask people to pay for subscriptions.
The gamble, of course, is that there is some other, hard-to-define benefit from having such a massive social media presence—and there may well be. Economist.com is also apparently planning to become itself more like a social media site, as well as integrate with Facebook via Facebook Connect. And thus it’s at least conceivable that advertisers will see the Economist’s engagement with social media as a powerful platform. A big if, but certainly an experiment worth watching.”
A fascinating DARPA research project probes how people can leverage online social networking to solve national-scope problems.
Good cautionary advice for anyone thinking about jumping into social media:
“… ‘social media is free … like a puppy.’ Staying involved in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites cost nothing but time. Lots of time.”
