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Social Media and the US elections

by Ignacio Jose Muruaga
8 replies
This topic came to my mind earlier today, since the Obama campaign in 2008 Social Media had been a extremely important channel for political campaigns, in a way, the "yes we can" campaign change politics for ever.
We had a new elections happening now, what do you think is the performance of the candidates so far? in terms of Social Media of course.
Hillary campaign, in my opinion, is having quite a weak point here, their channels generate a lot of contents (they upload a lot of new videos and stuff everyday) but so far, I havent see anything ground breaking (with the exception of the two spots staring the obama family that were launched recently, those were astonishing). The Clinton campaign doesnt seem to be using Social Media for mobilizing their people or making some serious fundraising, im quite dissapointed with all of these, because the democratic party has some very good teams in this area, they are apparently not using them .
The Trump campaign in the other hand, doesnt have a lot of success in this matter either, in fact, they have only launched 8 videos so far for Social Media, which is a very small number, specially when you consider their opponent is publishing a lot of content every hour.
However, I must say that Trump twitter is a very interesting case, in fact, I believe it might be the more powerful tool of communication he has right now, everything he tweets has an enormous reach, even people who really hate him follow him there.
He is no longer on the race, but the Bernie Sanders campaign has a very interesting use of Social Media, in fact I think he is in the debt with Social Media, he would probably havent get so far without them.
What do you think?
I dont live in the USA, but I find this election to be a fascinating thing, maybe someone from the United States can bring some interesting points to this debate.
#elections #media #social
  • Profile picture of the author easy video player flv
    I am not exactly sure on what you wanted to go on to, but in terms of the campaign I think Trump and Hillary have made social media their main campaign tool. Unfortunately, It is a little difficult to tell how effective they are because they are capitalizing on different priorities.
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  • Profile picture of the author professorrosado
    Hillary's people are much more vociferous on Facebook using negative tactics to an extreme and shooting down any hint of opposition through name calling and other ad hominem.

    Trump uses FB for fundraising a lot and I haven't seen Hillary do any - at least not in Florida.

    It seems that Hillary's people try intimidation as their most important strategy on Facebook. Criticizing the candidate and then his supporters seem to be the modus operandi to their social media campaign.

    Since they're using these low-end methods I must assume that they are trying to appeal to their base (making them feel that they're making the "intelligent" choice) and trying to sway non-committed voters through volume and loudness.

    As some wikileaks emails have indicated, the democratic handlers clearly indicate that they are dealing with "an unaware and compliant citizenry". This "attitude" is discernable in their social media campaigning.

    However, regular media is also impacting the social media conversation. Altogether, and as evidenced in the current polls, there is an astronomical amount of extremely negative posts against Trump and yet he is still within the margin of error on some polls and, if past performance be an indicator, will undoubtedly catch up to Hillary by Election day - if not surpass her slightly. It may still be a very close race to call come Nov. 8th unless something happens between now and then to disrupt the ebb and flow of trending public opinion.
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  • Profile picture of the author zTGamer
    This is a really complicated topic because... we can't know how effective their media are...
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  • Profile picture of the author stevetickolo
    The thing is, their social media campaign is working but their identities are too difficult to get out of the way of their positively aimed campaigns. I mean it is to early to tell which is more effective because the election hasn't happened yet.
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  • Profile picture of the author EugeneWHZ
    I think that there are 2 complex of marketing actions for both candidates and Social Media Marketing is only the small part of the campaign. I'm sure none of them considered SM as core channel for campaign.
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  • Profile picture of the author Ignacio Jose Muruaga
    I agree with most of the points you have made.

    None of the two candidates have used Social Media as the central core of their campaigns, I believe this a great deficit, specially regarding young voters, which could be reached through social media.

    I also agree that the main strategy of both candidates is to use social media for movilizing their votes and activists, not more than that. To summarize, it seems this elections is not bringing any new value to digital campaigns.
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  • Profile picture of the author professorrosado
    True that young people would be most impacted by social media campaigns, but the elections should be about issues and not all issues are germane to that demographic.

    Naturally, certain platforms traditionally would be more appealing in this case to that demographic. but neither side is wholly dependent on such markets for a win and is better left to supporters to freely share messages amongst their contacts.
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  • Profile picture of the author Ignacio Jose Muruaga
    I agree, campaigns are about issues, and the current technologies are a great oportunities for working with a good segmentation strategy to get to all audiences with individual messages, and thats where think both campaigns are currently failing, most of the messages they have launch have just basic segmentation (latinos, african americans, lgbt) or no segmentation at all, im surprise by that because the Obama 2008 campaign probe the great power that a good segmentation can have in a campaign, and it did that in a time were segmentation tools were extremely basic.

    I do think that the contents that are being created by the roots of both campaings is quite good, even Trump supporters create some good content on their own (you know, good if you like the kind of messages they create, personally I dont, of course).

    We have a little less than two weeks until the elections, I hope we will start seen some good actions in Social Media in the upcoming days.
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