Social media could play decisive role in US election

NET RESULTS:OVER THE weekend, I received a personal email from Rufus Gifford, the national financial director of president Barack Obama's re-election campaign. Well okay: I and tens of millions of others received a "personal" email, addressing us by our first names, briefly asking us to donate to the campaign before a March 31st Federal Election Commission–imposed deadline.

I am sure the various Republican candidates were doing the same by email and other digital means. Anyway, I donated. I donated to Obama’s first election campaign four years ago. And I have donated in the four years in between on the basis of persuasive reasons sent to me by the campaign via an email or a tweet.

I am hardly unique in this. But, as I thought back over years of previous US presidential and other elections (in which US citizens can vote from abroad), I realised I had never contributed financially before to a campaign.

Why are emails, tweets and Facebook messages different in getting me to part with my cash? They weren’t seen as being vastly superior modes of fundraising and communication until the 2008 Obama campaign turned the use of social media for an election into a fine art.

There have been many studies of the campaign and its use of social media, but it really boils down to this, at least for me. The messages reached me in a format that I make time for in my day, with information I was interested in, or lured me into wanting to learn more about – clicking through to find out why there was a deadline on the 31st, for example.

After I donated the first time, the campaign requested enough information to be able to keep contacting me in the future, and they have done so very effectively – for many people perhaps to the point of overkill, with weekly and sometimes daily emails.

Still, despite some mild annoyance on my part at the frequency of such communications, they also tempted me in later fundraising drives with the prospect of a free T-shirt or bumper sticker in exchange for a donation.

Anyone who has ever been to a technology conference will know that a free T-shirt can motivate just about any desired behaviour, so I don’t feel I have to defend myself too fiercely for my weakness. And, of course, I have never worn any of the T-shirts, and the bumper sticker remains unstuck.

Candidates have always had to take the campaign to where the voters are; these days, people across the age spectrum are online. Obama realised that to a greater extent than anyone else had and, in 2008, galvanised a younger generation of voters as well as capturing the moment at which huge numbers of people of all ages were routinely online.

Will social media be a decisive factor in this year’s election? Many think so. If so, Obama went in with the upper hand. Late last year, when the 2012 presidential election began to kick off, Obama had five times as many Twitter followers as all the leading Republican candidates combined, and eight times as many Facebook fans as the combined Republicans.

Nonetheless, the former head of president George W Bush’s campaign argued this week that far more Republicans are actively discussing and posting about politics, going by popular hash tags on Twitter.

But I’m not so sure about that argument. Having lots of politically engaged friends and relatives, I know people would be as likely to use the hash tag if arguing con as arguing pro. On the other hand, people follow people on Twitter they don’t necessarily like. But having those followers still gives a vast base for communication.

One development that did interest me when I donated this time was the way the campaign encourages the social part of networking – they make it very easy for you to tweet or post to Facebook about your donation and to encourage others to do likewise.

I was given the choice of six possible tweets – five were prescripted and came with a prepared hash tag, while one was left blank for a personal message.

The tweets were not without a sense of humour. One read: “Reasons I just donated to support President Obama: he can sing!” followed by the hash tag #singerinchief.

It made me laugh, but I sure wasn’t about to tweet that myself. In fact, I didn’t tweet anything at all, which I suppose means they didn’t hook me in in the way they would have most liked.

Second, that is, to getting my virtual cash through an online donation.