CR: The Liberal Party loves Malcolm Gladwell. RS: Indeed.
CR: Although he said some bad things about them, so I don’t know if that love affair has ended. Any- way, there are the early adopters who are there us- ing this tool, and not just speaking to each other, but pushing messages. Their value is not only in that they’re doing all the work for you for free, it’s that they’re pushing out a peer-endorsed mes- sage. They’re doing the things we’ve always tried to figure out how to do using tools like knocking on doors, making phone calls or writing letters. They’re telling their friends, “I like this person,” or, “I don’t like this person”; “this issue is important to me,” or, “this issue isn’t important to me.” That’s something we can’t recreate with money. You actu- ally have to get people to do it.
RS: The difference, I think, between knocking on doors and the influencers on Facebook or Twitter is that one reaches a target audience and the other a cross section of random people and potential vot- ers or supporters. If I’m a Conservative Twitterer am I mostly reaching Conservative Twitterers? Am I only speaking to people who already agree with me on the issue? I may be amplifying the message, I may be motivating people on an issue, but am I actually changing anybody’s opinion or is it going to be of any use in a campaign?
MS: I guess that’s really where I’m at. I think we aren’t changing anyone’s opinion with this stuff. I think what we’re doing is amplifying our reach to our activists. I also think there’s a danger, to Chad’s point there are many people who believe this is a substitute for knocking on doors or making phone calls when, in fact, it very clearly isn’t. I’m not sure if you reach any undecided voters on this. I don’t know if a single person’s ballot choice is going to be affected by the latest iPhone app or yesterday’s Twitter post or whether or not they’ve posted new pictures on Flickr. I think, instead, we need to look at social media for what it really can do which is help to engage our activists in doing something else. Is it a useful tool for raising money amongst people who may not sit at home and respond to telemarketers? Is it a useful tool for those people who don’t open every piece of mail they get? The answer is probably yes. But is it useful for swing- ing and moving undecided voters? I still think the answer is “no”.
RS: Where it’s also useful is engaging reaction to
the issue of the day among your activists, and that is valuable to political parties and to political leaders. Especially in the context of a campaign where so many issues are being thrown out so quickly.
CR: And it moves so fast. The raw Twitter feed or the raw Facebook status update feed is one of the most brilliant ‘of the moment’ qualitative research tools out there right now. If something has just happened you are actually going to see what the most interested people are saying about it immedi- ately. There is also a large enough sample that you see a diversity of opinion.
RS: It really is the activists, the engaged people. So, from a fundraising perspective it’s fantastic. In a leadership context it’s very useful, because those are the only people you’re speaking to; those very engaged people.
If you’re running a campaign, whether it’s an election campaign or an issues campaign, following that “Twitter” narrative and getting in to that narrative is absolutely critical. Rob Silver
CR: Let me respond to Mark’s point in two ways: positive and negative. I agree with you that the great danger of social media is slacktivism. This notion that you’re getting your own people to click a but- ton once, but the action isn’t meaningful. When you get a hundred thousand people to say they’re for or against prorogation, something few of them may- be understood the importance of, what does that mean, really? The other side of that, though, is that I do think there is a way to reach out to the voter we’ve lost touch with through things like photos. Now, you mentioned Flickr. Photos are the most clicked through, most acted on item in social media. And they’re the one we don’t talk about a lot be- cause we talk about the platforms they sit on. Let’s say there’s a photo of myself and a political candi- date that the two of us are in and it pops up on my mother’s feed, and then the friends of my mother or my best friend or other people who are non- political. There’s an important personal delivery of a peer endorsement that does things like counteract a negative advertisment because if all my mother’s
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