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    New Media Handbook: For Local And State Election Campaigns
    New Media Handbook: For Local And State Election Campaigns
    New Media Handbook: For Local And State Election Campaigns
    Ebook62 pages56 minutes

    New Media Handbook: For Local And State Election Campaigns

    By Florian S. Gust

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    About this ebook

    When it comes to new media, political candidates need to know all their options, in order to make the right decisions on how to use the internet and social networks for their election efforts. To get the most out of all the different services and implement them successfully into their campaigns, candidates need to do more than just upload a couple of pictures to Facebook and post news on Twitter.
    Understanding how social media works is essential, and the New Media Handbook: For Local And State Election Campaigns therefore provides a general overview of the most important platforms and how to use them for campaign purposes.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFlorian S. Gust
    Release dateMar 19, 2012
    ISBN9781476447094
    New Media Handbook: For Local And State Election Campaigns

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      Book preview

      New Media Handbook - Florian S. Gust

      New Media Handbook

      For Local And State Election Campaigns

      By Florian S. Gust

      Copyright 2012 Florian S. Gust

      Smashwords Edition

      Smashwords Edition, License

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Table of Contents

      1. Introduction

      2. New Media Plan

      3. Campaign Website

      4. Facebook

      5. Twitter

      6. Google+

      7. Online Advertising

      8. Free Media

      9. New Media Strategy

      10. Future Perspectives

      1. Introduction

      Political campaigns transform rapidly, and especially presidential candidates have to adopt new developments fairly quickly to avoid falling behind the competition. In consequence, campaigns constantly try hard to find new ways to reach voters, get them interested in their candidate, and eventually vote for them. This process has even accelerated with the increasing importance of the internet and New Media and culminated in the efforts made in the 2008 presidential election.

      However, 2008 was not the starting point of internet-use in elections, instead you have to look back to the campaigns of Howard Dean and George W. Bush in 2004, where two completely new ways of campaigning were introduced. Dean tried to circumvent the problem that people would visit campaign websites only rarely and instead get their information elsewhere. Therefore he introduced so called microsites, which only contained content about a single issue or targeted a specific group of voters. He succeeded in creating a huge community, which donated record amounts to his campaign.

      On the Republican side, President Bush had a secret weapon called microtargeting, which had been unprecedented in elections. The campaign collected massive amounts of data about prospective voters and divided them into different categories in order to target specific groups with carefully tailored messages. This new method did not only increase their response rate, but has also been a key factor of his reelection.

      Four years later, the game completely changed when Barack Obama was able to successfully use every tool the internet had to offer at that time. He was virtually everywhere, on mySpace, Twitter, Facebook, and he even had his own social network called my.BarackObama.com. How could any other candidate compete with that?

      New media gave him a great advantage in his election, but it hardly replaced television and print ads or even grassroots on-the-ground campaigning. It rather helped the grassroots campaign to organize and attract new supporters. The campaign knew that they could not copy the playbook of previous campaigns but had to create their own, because the old rules did not apply to the new environment.

      The 2010 midterm elections marked a slight turning point, when campaigns realized that being present on every single platform would be a waste. Thus they concentrated their efforts on the most popular two, Facebook and Twitter. Candidates for Congress also capitalized on blogs to keep their supporters updated and appeal to prospective voters. mySpace, which was already in decline in 2008, was no longer part of a candidate’s new media portfolio. This left more time and money for Facebook and Twitter, where the main audience was to be found.

      It can be stated that new media was far less important than in the presidential elections two years earlier, mostly because the candidates did not have enough money to sustain such an extensive online campaign. They also did not need it, especially for those running for the House of Representatives. Indeed candidates for state legislatures all over the country lacked far behind their federal counterparts, as very few had a profile on Facebook, or were actively tweeting. Some managed to get elected even without having a campaign website.

      Back in fall of 2011, when I came across the campaign website of a State Senator of Arizona, who ran a poorly designed website, I started researching the state of new media adoption in state and local election campaigns. What I found was devastating and made me wonder, how candidates

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