Social Media: A factor in politics
Following the series of four podcasts on Social Media that I did from the National Speakers Association convention in San Francisco in the last week, I’ve been more attuned than usual to mention of the effects of blogs, podcasts and online networks in our world today.
Facility with Social Media is one of the clear differentiators between the campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, claims Edward Luce in yesterday’s Financial Times.
Luce quotes Peter Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute, who marks a clear difference between the two campaigns’ use of social media and technology:
The Obama website offers almost instant video replays of his speeches, which are also packaged by Obama officials for YouTube. A few mouse clicks from each webcast provides a simple procedure to make online donations. Users can set up blogs, join the Obama Facebook group and even download ring tones featuring recordings of his speeches.
The contrast with Mrs Clinton’s relatively conventional website is instructive. In one of her first webcasts Mrs Clinton offered to “have a conversation with America”. But the questions she received were obviously screened. The fact these “conversations” took place online could not disguise the fact they were controlled.
This is eerily reminiscent of the contrasting ways in which smaller, more entrepreneurial companies approach this technology when compared to the larger organizations of the Fortune 500.
Luce chronicles the flexibility and tactical advantages offered by an aggressive use of web-based tools when compared to a more inflexible establishment approach. This observation isn’t new. Back in 2000, author Christopher Locke predicted the end of business as usual in his prescient book The Cluetrain Manifesto. Locke claimed that thanks to the conversations taking place on the web, citizens have found a voice that undermine the traditional command-and-control hierarchy that organizes most corporate marketing groups and political campaigns.
Is it too late for Hillary to get a clue?
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