Social Media Gives Extra Boost in Close Election

This past weekend I served on a panel and as a judge for a campaign training school called NEW Leadership at the Carl Albert Center for Congressional Research Studies in Norman, Oklahoma. One of the moderators commented that it's pretty difficult to quantify results from new media on an electorate, which is a discussion I feel like I often have with candidates or potential clients... heck even existing clients at least once a month!

Most people in professional politics accept that a presence online must be the norm for a serious candidate today, although many campaigns still don't believe that a professional presence is needed judging from the obscene website design and atrocious fundraising emails that I am cursed to see each week.

Depending on where you are in the country and when your primary election is being held, most candidates probably aren't on television with their advertising just yet but probably all of them have done their benchmark poll and possibly one or two tracking polls. One such candidate I'm working with has seen an eight point jump in numbers in the course of a few months. The only thing that is different is that the new media operation stepped up a notch.

Another candidate I work with put a question in his/her benchmark poll asking where the person being polled had met or heard of the candidate. This is a pretty standard question generally used to gauge the effectiveness of the media or campaign outreach. The highest number is generally something like "from TV" or "from radio" or "From the newspaper" - but because the campaign hadn't started any of these forms of outreach yet, the highest percentage was "from the internet."

When I was speaking to these young women at NEW Leadership I said that "New Media" is not a replacement for traditional media its part of a building block that campaigns should use early on to develop relationships with the electorate in a cheaper and more effective way. I told them to treat it like an online field campaign that you can eventually use to push message as well as do fundraising on.

And a big reason for all of this, couldn't have been better stated by the New York Times in a piece they posted today about the generational divide in the Columbia elections.

"Mr. Mockus “represents something totally different, something that’s not traditional,” Ms. Pacheco said. “Older people are not used to having politicians thinking outside the box.”

Using tools that are familiar to them — a Facebook page, instant messages, videos on YouTube — Mr. Mockus’s followers in New York strive to drum up support for their candidate and organize events. It is a strategy that proved successful before, they said, when a certain senator from Illinois used social-networking media to mobilize young voters and ended up in the White House."

In a close election every edge you can get is important, and an online media campaign began in October is a joke. The earlier a campaign starts online outreach the better. The the less the chance a campaign will encounter someone like me writing a blog about how bad your fundraising emails are or how embarrassing your website looks or functions.