Rock… No… ReTweet the Vote!
The use of social media during a political campaign has been very well documented over the past couple of years. The Obama campaign and his social media chief, Chris Hughes, broke some huge barriers and set an example for political campaigns going forward.
One of the more recent, highly publicized examples, was San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s announcement of his bid for California Governor via Twitter and then Facebook and YouTube. Like Obama, he is rallying support for his campaign through the main social media outlets online, and even making his followers on those sites the first to know (yet another blow to traditional media!).
But what’s different about the Mayor’s social media efforts, and most likely those of other politicians in the coming years, is that his Facebook and Twitter accounts were not started solely for the purpose of his campaign for governor. Rather, he’s had these accounts for a while and has been building his group of core followers ever since.
Politicians now have the opportunity to start early and gain loyal followers throughout their entire political career through channels that are constantly feeding them information and enabling supporters to interact and be far more engaged than any email list or static website. It’s a build-up over time, a growing froth of political support.
These people can easily become evangelists to their collective group of friends and followers — a massive broadcast channel that did not exist several years ago and may begin to play a much larger role in the outcomes of elections, especially in tech-savvy cities like San Francisco or New York.
And Gavin knows it too. He used his last 6 characters of his 136 character gubernatorial announcement to ask his Twitter followers one simple yet potentially powerful request: “ReTweet.”