Social Networks for Everyone!! Blog

This is a question for you.

Do you believe that internet and social networks can influence the next election results?

It’s clear that the social networks are having a great impact in the presidential race, but how much? is most media hype or it is real? Can videos on YouTube change the voters mind?

Political analysts, check BCC blog about this, claim that one of the reasons why Obama campaign has been successful, it’s because he used internet to empower and engage thousands of volunteers to campaign door to door for him.

 On the other hand, Ron Paul, the last republican candidate that remains on the race against McCain is the presidential candidate with more presence online. Yes, I know that nobody care much but he doesn’t drop out officially yet. He beats any other candidate, republican or democrat, in terms on online presence. Check the number of YouTube videos dedicated to him. His followers even claim that he’s the geek candidate! and with all this online presence he didn’t do very well.

In rsitez we made a social network for a politician, I was curious to see how he was doing and how he was using our/his site. I thought that we could potentially find a good market opportunity with this kind of sites. The results were mixed. It worked great to organize events with his supporters, get some donations but I think that this guy thought that a social media site grow by itself. He thought that it is necessary just to create a dotcom with social capabilities to send your messages out and reach millions of people…and well, it’s not so simple. If you don’t consider your social media efforts in the same organized, analytical and methodic that you will consider traditional media, you will not be getting much for having online presence. A community manager is needed and more important well crafted content in the same way that newspapers, tv, radio, etc. Also it is needed, a lot of data mining to really extract all the advantages that this new media bring to you in terms of valuable and actionable  information. In addition, the community manager needs to check also what is said outside their community and be able to react really fast to any online attack, this need to be really, really on real time.

Back to the presidential candidates, Obama vs McCain. The contrast and difference between both are huge and it is clear that Obama seems to have an advantage between young supporters hanging out in social sites (very, very popular in Facebook) but how important is this is for election’s day? In the past, young people have been the segment of the population with smallest vote rate. Do you think this time they are going to vote? If yes, you can argue that Obama needs to continue spending money on internet ads. If not, maybe he will be better focusing on traditional TV ads. And for McCain?, do you think he can do better if he figures out how to get donations online? or it is too late? and he just need to concentrate in the classic dinners fundraising events?  

 What do you think?

 Thanks

Luis