E-Marketing and Politics: How Social Media Plays a Giant Role

The 2008 election was the beginning of a new era in politics. Not because there was an African American president in office, but because of a revolutionary tool his campaign used: Social Media. No other presidential candidate has ever been able to realize the full potential of the E-marketing as much as President Obama. Case studies have shown that millions of people supported Obama's online campaigns and that they even brought him millions of dollars in fundraising.

The graph above shows the online support Obama received through social media and other internet platforms. By looking at it you can see that both of these presidential candidates receive millions of viewers on their YouTube videos, and millions of unique website visitors. This doesn't include the ridiculous amount of impressions their ads on both YouTube and Facebook received. 

The real issue with understanding how social media and other forms of E-Marketing change presidential campaigns is seeing the way in which campaigns that attack other candidates. The fact that everything has the ability to go viral isn't necessary a positive thing, the fact that everything has the ability to go viral in a matter of minutes makes it so much easier to spread the word across social networks. A prime example of this is Rick Perry's political campaign, one that I saw crash and burn hours after it was launched. The second his team publicized the some of his campaign commercials it immediately invoked a negative response among the Tumblr community. Whether or not Rick Perry was severely against the Gay Community wasn't even a question anymore, everyone had already spread the word that he was a kind of Gay Community Anti-Christ because he mentioned something along the lines of there being something wrong with the world we live in because of the fact that gays can serve openly in the military. His video was passed around Tumblr with hate messages so much that people began to dislike his ad on YouTube, here's a screen shot of what his video likes and dislikes were at at one point:

Rick Perry's campaign on social media was an example of one that fails, although he one the race in the state he ran for, had he run for president he wouldn't have stood a chance due to the power of social media. As for content going unsupervised one can see an example with this gif image I found on Tumblr. 

On online ad campaigns

It's important to realize how many impression online ads receive through both YouTube and other social media sites. On YouTube ads work very differently than they do on Facebook. Instead of just being an impression on the side of the page, ads on YouTube show in the following way.

Most of the time we are obliged into watching propaganda and political advertisements on YouTube, and while we can skip them after a few seconds the propaganda is done whether the information in the ad is true or not. There are absolutely no barriers to entry when you are making an ad for a social media site. Unless a ton of people report you there are no true boundaries as to what you can put in an ad, as long as you have a working credit card and follow the few guidelines YouTube and Facebook have for their ads that mainly restrict certain products and mimicking their own elements and logos, you're in the clear. 

I believe that a lot of the information put on the internet is based on truth, and it's important to verify sources and check several different reliable sources before jumping to conclusions about anything you see online. Propaganda and politician ad campaigns are never 100% true. It's important to realize that before deciding on what we vote for and what we decide to give our full support. 

For more info on Obama's Presidential Social Media Campaign visit: 

“Applied lessons from the Obama presidential campaign” singlegrain.com Web. 04 Mar. 2012. <http://www.singlegrain.com/blog/social-media-applied-lessons-from-the-obama-presidential-campaign/ >.
"Barack Obama 2012 Campaign"  Huffington PostWeb.04 Mar. 2012. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/28/barack-obama-2012-campaign_n_886280.html>

-B.Bonta