On the eve of the election, Republican Scott Brown has taken the lead in the polls by a margin but with a landslide on Social Media. Is it enough to upset this race?
The late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat is up for grabs in a surprisingly close race in Massachusetts that could imperil President Obama’s agenda. This is going to be an interesting race to watch today, not in the election polls but on the Social Networking sites.
I’ll be checking in with how many followers / friends each party gains:
Republican Scott Brown – Facebook Fan Page
- 1:30 pm EST on 01/18/10: 81,306 fans
- 10:34pm EST on 01/18/10: 90,710 fans
- 5:20pm EST on 01/19/10: 102,221 fans
Republican Scott Brown – Twitter
- 1:30pm EST on 01/18/10: 10,566 followers
- 10:34pm EST on 01/18/10: 11,268 followers
Democrat Martha Coakley – Facebook Fan Page
- 1:30pm EST on 01/18/10: 15,165 fans
- 10:34pm EST on 01/18/10: 16,775 fans
- 5:20pm EST on 01/19/10: 18,368 fans
Democrat Martha Coakley – Twitter
- 1:30pm EST on 01/18/10: 3,601 followers
- 1:30pm EST on 01/18/10: 3,823 followers
Social Media provides a very quick, easy and inexpensive way to get a message out to the masses and to share those ideas with your friends. The point of every political campaign to spread your message to gain a collective of followers. The Brown campaign gets this, while Coakley’s seems to playing an outdated game:
Last Friday, CNN asked the Coakley campaign why they were not running any Google ads, compared to the Brown campaign which has shown an aggressive strategy for advertising on the popular search engine. Campaign spokesperson Alex Zaroulis responded in an e-mail that they were focusing on social networks: “We are running an aggressive online campaign – from the blogosphere to e-mail to facebook and twitter.”
Both parties seem to be actively updating today… but the question is, when did they each start. If Martha Coakley ignored this channel at the start, it seems she lost valuable time and followers.
Think about this for your poltical campaign or business… when is the tipping point when it’s too late to catch up? Can you afford to wait until that point?
So What Does This Mean on a Local Level?
Most people would agree that the Obama campaign had a HUGE boost because of Social Media. So it’s surprising to me that this has not yet trickled down to the state or local level. Just today I was asked by a local politician about the pros & cons of using blogging & social networking sites.
My first suggestion was to create a Facebook Fan Page. The initial objection from a person involved with the campaign was that he did not think they would max out the 5,000 connections on a Personal Profile. But the county has over 200,000 residents. Just looking at the numbers, it makes sense to open up a communication channel that can grow to support a community of that size.
But even more important is what open communication channels can mean, regardless of what political party you are in. While gathering my research, I inquired with a local family about how they were interacting with their County Executive. Their response:
“We probably interact with [The County Executive] more because of his presence on Facebook – he makes it clear he wants to hear from his community. I think it’s also important to add that neither my husband nor I voted for him and actively campaigned against him. But, because of his outward presence and quick ability to communicate back with people I might actually vote to re-elect him in a couple of years. I’m pretty sure that without Facebook, I couldn’t say that about him.”
I’ll be following up tomorrow with more specific tips for politicians.
