Politicians and Social Media

Social media such as Facebook and Twitter have become important strategies in promoting politicians. The Barack Obama campaign was extremely successful in activating followers to get behind the campaign and get Obama elected. Kevin Rudd was one of the first politicians in Australia to use social media, merchandising and online promotions to promote himself and his political views. This strategy assisted him in getting elected in 2007 with the Kevin07 campaign. He again used a similar strategy in 2013, but this time he was unsuccessful. The idea of social media in political campaigns is to make the politicians appear more human and allow them to connect to people in their homes and workplaces. While there was an outpouring of grief over Kevin Rudd’s cat, a lot of the social media was comical or trivial. (Swan & Visentin, 2011)

Here is the Hamster Wheel's take on politics and media

 

 

                                                                (Hamster Wheel, 2011)

To be successful in this arena the politicians need to have charisma, personality and humility. The ability to connect and look good are also required to succeed, they also need to be entertaining if they want to connect with the younger voters, as their primary reasons for  using social media is to be entertained. Older candidates need to think hard about the image they wish to portray to the audience, they need to appear wise, but most importantly connected with the latest trends, as well as wants and needs of the community (Swan & Visentin, 2011).

If you would like a closer look at Kevin’s social media antics visit ruddfactor.com

Riengolds theory on co-operation and connection is evident is these campaigns as they relate to these campaigns aim to turn self interest into collective action. “Central to this class of cooperation-amplifying technologies are eight key clusters, each with distinctive contributions to cooperative strategy. Each of these technology clusters can be viewed not only as a template for design of cooperative systems, but also as tools people can use to tune organizations, projects, processes, and markets for increased cooperation” (Rheingold, 2005). This is essentially the philosophy behind these campaigns. The notion that social media is an amazing tool to incite the audience into action.

 

 

 

Electioneering will change the campaigning strategies in the future, politicians will be able to interact with people via Blogs and social media enabling them to understand what the public wants and adjust their campaign to meet the needs of the voters. Social media also allows them to track followers, ‘Likes’ and views enabling them to estimate the number of followers, before the polls are available.

Reflection:

I believe social media would be used a lot more often in political campaigns, therefore we as consumers, need to decipher the information and determine whether it is genuine or created by the politicians ‘spin doctors’.

Does political campaigning deicide who you vote for, or do you vote for the same party regardless of the leader?

References

Rheingold, H., 2005. Technologies of Cooperation Report. [Online]
Available at: http://rheingold.com/cooperation-notes/
[Accessed 8 January 2014].

Swan, J. & Visentin, L., 2011. Political Heavyweights are online, upfront and in your face. [Online]
Available at: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2013/political-heavyweights-are-online-upfront-and-in-your-face-20130807-2rgpc.html
[Accessed 8 January 2014].