In Crowd Surfing we examine the use of social media in the heated battle between Obama and Clinton for the Democratic Party’s nomination. This news item from the BBC brings the story right up to date with a useful summary of the role of social media in the ongoing Presidential campaign.
Whereas Obama’s supporters have tended to use social media as a positive political force, to ‘galvanise a whole new army of supporters’, McCain’s team have, to date, been more affective at using the same channels for negative purposes … to attack Obama’s lack of experience. The Obama team has started to respond in kind, with their recent attack on McCain’s extensive property portfolio going down a storm in the blogospere. We can expect the battle to get even dirtier as we get closer to the election.
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I recently heard Clay Shirky describe the evolution of how social media is leveraged by presidential candidates. He said Dean used social media and specifically sites like Meetup.com as a tactic. Obama has leveraged platforms on the Web not as a reactionary tactic but as a core strategy from the beginning.
So many of Obama’s best ideas were beta tested during the Dean campaign … something we hopefully acknowledge in the book.