The influence of technology and social media on the 2012 presidential election

The influence of technology and social media on the 2012 presidential election
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The influence of technology and social media on the 2012 presidential election
President Obama was re-elected for another term with a campaign team which was undergirded by a disciplined digital effort which strongly depended on targeted voter communications, and an innovative and wide-ranging usage of social media plus online fundraising tools. This paper is based on the book Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America by Dan Balz. In particular, this paper provides a comprehensive discussion of how one factor influenced the outcome of the 2012 United States presidential election. The factor chosen as to have largely influenced the outcome of the election is technology and social media.
It is of note that in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, people were always searching for updates and news, and even whenever news and updates were not there, the contenders wished that they were. Mitt Romney and Barack Obama both approached the online campaign with dissimilar tactics. In essence, the effect of social media in the presidential election illustrated a sharp contrast in the effectual utilization of technology and social media to draw the voters’ attention (Balz, 2013). In the year 2008, Obama’s presidential campaign was momentous and made history. It is of note that not only was he the first black president of the United States, but Obama was also the very first presidential candidate to efficiently utilize social media a key strategy for campaign. Considering how omnipresent social media is presently, one can easily forget that in the year 2008, interacting with fans on Facebook and sending out voting reminders on Twitter was a rather big deal. In 2007, when Barack Obama made his announcement, Twitter, a vital form of social media, had only just begun; iPhones were not even there yet (Rutledge, 2013). Fast forward 4 years, the media landscape had changed greatly. There was an ever-growing number of social media tools and a fast growing user base. President Obama is considered as the very first social media president.
According to Balz (2013), not only did he have the expertise on his team, but Barack Obama also had an established social media machine up and running. Given that social media is all about relationships, it is very fundamental to create and manage those connections. Even though Mitt Romney and his team also employed the technological tools such as social media in the 2012 presidential election, his team never achieved the traction that Obama and his team did. Balz (2013) states that Obama took over the social media space since his campaign team had a clear understanding of how networks function and work. The Obama campaign team demonstrated to be more effective in attracting likes or followers to his social media profiles in relation to how the Mitt Romney campaign team was. As of the night of the election, Romney had 29,172 YouTube views, 1.7 million followers on Twitter and only 12 million fans on Facebook. Conversely, Obama had 259, 685 YouTube views, 21 million following on Twitter, and 32 million Facebook fans (Burrus, 2012).
The key power of social media lies in user engagement that is measured by spreadability of content, rather than in the number of Tweets or posts. For instance, Barack Obama logged two times as many Facebook likes, and roughly twenty times as many re-tweets as Mitt Romney. Barack Obama had much greater and far superior reach with his existing social media base as well as spreadable content (Balz, 2013). Nonetheless, the main drivers of an effectual social media campaign are not based upon the current technology, but upon the psychology of social behaviours. Social media basically fashions a ...