Ryan MacMillan

Jeremy, in his infinite wisdom, has already noted the profitable use of social media activities by the current US presidential campaigns. Whether it’s Obama’s friends in the world of pop music buying him acres of free publicity or Hillary Clinton’s leveraging of web contacts to raise $4million in 36 hours, there seems to be no doubt that social media now plays a central role in the American political process. It is not simply a matter of campaigns seeing the web as merely another communications platform, along with blanket TV adds, cold-calling, mass-mailings and good ole-timey town hall meetings - rather the internet increasingly seems to be the platform on which all these other communications activities are based. Crucial caucusing strategies are arranged in online forums, money is raised by the shedload in blogging gift drives, policy positions are fleshed out and criticisms instantly rebutted in online social networking activities that can easily be spread across the internet.

Take, for example, Obama’s current problems with his (now former) pastor and religious advisor, Jeffrey Wright. Wright has in the past said some unspeakably stupid things about the USA and terrorism (especially given that he was being taped and that, seemingly, his church are the sort of organisation who remain quite happy to sell copies of said tapes to the media even now) and thus Obama has been called upon to repudiate the man he once looked to for moral guidance. Were we able to contemplate a British equivalent of such an event, we would see Gordon Brown on a Sunday morning talk show, perhaps, offering his apologies to a seasoned BBC hack, or some junior Tory shadow minister would find themselves prostrate on the Today show, proffering quick soundbites. What we get with Obama, however, is a nice bit of KUDOS, and I say this as a fervent Hillary supporter (quite how Jeremy and I are going to survive this project together once President Clinton II locks all his type up, I don’t know). Obama, rather than go onto the Sunday talk shows (which, in fairness are far more influential than their UK equivalents) to distance himself from the loopy Rev. Wright, went to the Huffington Post, instead. By promptly producing a clearly written, fairly straight-up blog post explaining himself, Obama set in motion the KUDOS process. This is how:

From the Obama brand’s point of view, the post (which I think is pretty weak, personally, but I’m biased) is a piece of Knowledge (that Obama does not endorse Wright’s idiocy) which it is clearly Useful and Desirable for the brand to get out into their social network. Crucially, being a blog post, it is Open (to criticisms and acclaim in the comments section) and Shareable. For members of the Obama brand’s social network, it is in Sharing the Knowledge of Obama’s repudiation which is Useful (in terms of counteracting Clintonian and McCainite attacks) and Desirable (in so far as it assuages their own concerns about Obama’s links to Wright). The Openness of the blog post, also means that members of the Obama brand’s social network can use it to promote their candidate in any fashion they so desire (of course, the flipside of which is that so can Clinton’s). However, one parses it, the Obama blog post fulfills all the qualities of KUDOS, of a succesful social media activity. Quite how succesful it will be remains to be seen - it is not as though Hillary Clinton is without her own bloggers etc. However, for the moment, it seems as though KUDOS has enabled Obama to leverage his online social networks in order to directly improve his immediate political environment.

All of which leaves me thinking - can anyone remember a time when a British politician successfully leveraged their online social networks? Actually, scratch that, can anyone remember when British politicians had online social networks? Thus begging one final question - which I’ll attempt, with Jeremy’s help to answer in a forthcoming post - why are British politicians lagging so far behind their US counterparts when it comes to the potential of social media?

UPDATE: Just to give a quick for instance of the KUDOS of Obama’s blogpost, today it’s republished, almost in full as the top-of-the-page post at Politics1, one of the busiest political gossip sites in the US (posts regularly reach over 400 comments). The guy who runs Politics 1 is, of course, an Obama supporter.