Social Media’s Role in Politics
Posted by Nick O'Neill on January 8th, 2008 3:14 PMIf you needed any other signs that social media is transforming the face of politics, yesterday ABC News released a statement saying that there have been over one million installs of the U.S. Politics application on Facebook. Blogs have played a significant role in elections since the 2000 election and now branded presedential polls have become ubiquitous. As Caroline McCarthy pointed out last week, MySpace held a virtual primary in which Barack Obama and Ron Paul were declared the winners.
The Techcrunch primaries have produced similar results to the MySpace poll from last week. It’s no surprise given the broad support that both candidates enjoy across the web. What is interesting is the massive increase in chatter following Obama’s win in the Iowa primaries last week and expected win in the New Hampshire primaries tonight. Obama has been using many of the same grassroots strategies popularized by the Dean campaign back in 2004.
A large portion of the grassroots strategies are online activities. Last night I received an announcement from Widgetbox that Barack Obama is winning the widget war on the web. The statistics were pretty impressive. So far Obama has had over 149,000 widget installations. The next closest contender is Huckabee with 84,000 installations. After Thompson who has attracted over 70,000 installations the adoption rate falls off drastically. No other candidate has more than 14,000 installations.
Widgets are just one measure of political activity on the web. The real question though is not whether people are talking about politics on the web but how it’s transforming the sector. Information is dissiminated instantaneously and voters are more likely to consider new information up until the moment they vote. While social media may not transfoming our ideals and beliefs, it is changing the way we get our information. How do you think social media is changing politics?
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All this is around elections (understandable, considering the current backdrop), but how about interaction with government and officials beyond elections?
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