Twitter gets attention in politics. Traditional journalists increasingly look to a politician’s tweets for source material, and blogs love nothing more than to speculate on the meaning of a vague posting. The politicians who don’t tweet have (I suspect) made a calculated decision to avoid the microblogging site, considering the ease of delegating tweeting to a publicist. Nevertheless, Twitter’s risks and benefits are being considered on Capitol Hill. Twitter is a veritable force in the spin game.
Twitter is a minimal social network, existing purely as a medium for sharing information. Tweets are amplified by traditional media outlets, content is dispersed in real time, and millions of users are passively observing the site’s content even if they aren’t actually tweeting themselves. It does one thing and one thing really well, making it the ideal social network for analysis.
The relative newness of social networks like Twitter make social media strategy a nebulous affair for campaigns who aren’t blessed with an intuitive grasp of these fast-paced platforms. Political candidates and their teams might understand that a social media presence is an essential element of politics in the 21st century, but have difficulty determining the amount of time and engagement necessary to optimize political gains.
This problem is mirrored in the difficulties faced by private enterprise. Forrester’s Augie Ray recently published “The ROI of Social Media Marketing,” which tackles the problem of measuring return from social media initiatives. It identifies 4 perspectives through which social media strategies should be evaluated:
- Financial perspective — increases in revenue or decreased costs
- Risk management perspective — preparation and speed in responding to attacks or damaging sentiment
- Digital perspective — the extension of digital assets
- Brand perspective — recognition as well as attitude towards a brand
These perspectives are suitable for measuring the success of social media campaigns, keeping in mind that the returns are not financial but political gains — votes, public opinion, etc. But the nature of the game does make for alterations:
- Campaign perspective — increases in donations or decrease in campaign costs; also net increase in votes
- Risk management perspective — same as above, but may also include responses to opponents.
- Digital perspective — same as above
- Poll perspective — poll numbers, attitude towards a candidate as well as his opponent; margin of loss/victory
The value placed on those perspectives differs from how they are valued in measuring a business’ social media efforts. Probably the most important factors in determining the weight of each perspective are the tenure of the candidate (current incumbency), his expectation of winning an election and time until an election day.
An incumbent candidate will measure his social media success differently because his message is different from a non-incumbent’s . Voters are concerned with an incumbent’s actions in office; for example, a Congressman would tweet about his voting record and activities on committees, whereas a candidate, limited to mere conjecture, would offer proposed solutions to perceived problems. Incumbency advantage allows officials to concentrate long term — on his approval rating and risk management — assuming they are not fighting an uphill battle for re-election. New candidates are very much concerned with building campaign infrastructure and making the necessary connections to ensure an influx of money, access to the media, and visibility to constituents. Finally, in the run-up to an election day, long term strategy takes a back seat assuming there is any doubt as to who will carry the election.
My immediate observation is that current social media campaigns are nowhere near sophisticated enough for a campaign itself to spend the time on granular analysis. One view might hold that measurement is helpful, but unnecessary; a social media presence alone provides enough passive benefits to justify forcing the intern to tweet any official’s/candidate’s goings-on. The numbers are not as important as the message.
Still, the sheer amount of investment in elections (financial, emotional) may be cause for greater scrutiny from the outside. Unfortunately those well-versed in social media tend to focus on marketing and enterprise, and politicians may have better ways to use resources than to pay a consultant for a sophisticated retrospective of their social media efforts. As a result, politicians don’t realize their social media strategies are incomplete, and never bother to develop complete ones.
This problem is made evident through examining Twitter. The value of Twitter is understood, at least on the abstract level, but its implementation by politicians is immature. Some point to the Obama campaign and Tea Party movement as examples of well-developed social media campaigns involving Twitter, but if anything, they are proto-examples driven by the luxuries of volunteer interest and powerful financial backing. In fact, Obama’s Twitter presence is criticized as exclusively ‘broadcasting,’ meaning Obama does not engage with other users, preferring to simply cast out his tweets for others to read.
The broadcasting strategy is echoed by most politicians, namely Congressmen. For example, Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX; http://twitter.com/michaelcburgess/) uses Twitter in much the same way, making observations and linking to relevant stories as opposed to engaging his constituents. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA; http://twitter.com/Boxer_2010) incorporates mentions of other users in her tweets, but they are not generally constituents. Broadcasting may be an effective way to distribute content alongside traditional media channels, but politicians miss out on the additional value of interaction.
Most politicians don’t have time to write @ replies for users on Twitter. And the ones who do may find value in social media where they lack resources to communicate through traditional channels. For example, Basil Marceaux (http://twitter.com/marceaux2010), a Republican gubernatorial candidate, does actually respond to people who ask him questions. But he is also not a mainstream politician. It’s also extremely unlikely that he has a social media analyst.
Politicians understand the value of Twitter but do not take time to effectively use it. There exist plenty of resources, many of them free, to manage and measure Twitter usage. There is also no barrier stopping an office from, at the very minimum, using Twitter to respond directly to constituent inquiry. Congressmen might find Twitter useful as a point of contact for district offices, helping manage casework on the office’s own schedule and reducing the volume of phone calls, all the while increasing the visibility of his services.
The most alarming thing is that politicians on Twitter hesitate to build complete strategies for social media when they should be able to. Incumbent politicians especially should establish long-term goals. All should ask how each activity engages the audience and contributes to their goals. Hopefully, politicians will take full advantage of these communications, enabling a more transparent and democratic society.
