Today our lives are less about physical relationships but rather more about the ones that we form over social media. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, just to name a few, are everyday hits on most American’s computers. As a Public Relations major, we spend a lot of time learning about the importance of social media in today’s world. To be competitive in the working world, knowledge of such applications is key.
To express the importance of social media, one should regard the Presidential Elections of 2008. Known as the 1st social networking campaign, it is important to take a look at how unobtrusively we were filled with ideas and thoughts about the candidates and the campaign. Unknowingly, as we logged into our social networking sites, we were exposed whether we knew it or not.
According to Thomas Friedman, who published The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, digital technology was and currently transforming America, including the political arena. At the time his book was published in 2005, “Friedman predicted that the political party that stakes out the emerging flat world political frontier will be the majority party in the twenty-first century.” With this in mind, I would definitely without a doubt agree. The social media network was what transformed the political area in 2008.
In an article I found this week, McCain admitted that “he doesn’t know how to work his computer, President Elect Obama’s team…leveraged the power of millions of online followers to not only finance his campaign, but to build a database of supporters who could be mobilized into foot soldiers in a massive ‘get out the vote drive’, according to an article I found.
Obama, nonetheless, used social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. On Twitter, Obama had over 120,000 followers. Those who followed him received regular posts about his whereabouts. According to the article, “It was fairly subtle and unobtrusive, but it kept Obama at the forefront of our thoughts. I’m sure this influenced many campaigning tweets. We definitely saw several heated discussions where we tried to convince undecided voters to vote for Obama.” As for Facebook, “While the Twitter crowd was substantial, it’s nothing compared to the nearly 3 Million supporters on Barack Obama’s Facebook page who tuned in for daily messages.” Nonetheless, YouTube, while there were “only 128,000 subscribers of the BarackObama You Tube Channel, there have been over 19 Million channel views. And this doesn’t take into account all the videos on other sites that may have influenced”.
Nonetheless, social media played a huge role in the 2008 elections. As far an unobtrusive research goes, Obama could informally measure the number of people who would access the information he could so easily put out there. As the public, we unknowingly were being observed and therefore were not bias. Not forced to look at something, made many of us more willing to look and read further.
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