Lessons in Political Communications: Rules Four and Five about messaging, Twitter

If you missed Rules One through Three, you can check them out here.

Rule Four is primarily aimed at Twitter, but Twitter’s really just a public outpouring of our collective id, so it applies to everyday life as well as politics and social media.

Ah yes, the Id. That raging, ravenous, unrestrained primal cauldron of emotions, thoughts, urges, impulses, desires, psyche; the absolute infant. Eat, scream, poop, sleep whenever and wherever you want.

That’s Twitter in a nutshell.

The unfiltered nature of tweets is part of their allure, but it’s also their greatest weakness. I often suggest candidates who are not already tweeting recreationally to avoid Twitter. I’d wager that more political mistakes have been made on Twitter than on any other social media platform.

That’s not to say that Twitter isn’t useful for campaigns of all levels. It’s often the most direct path to political reporters, and can be used to draw their attention to something that might not be compelling if delivered via email press release.

But with Twitter, as with all interactions, the operative Rule is: trust no one, confirm things that seem important, and if you’re passing on a rumor, note that it’s just a rumor.

Less-than-verifiable information can be important in a campaign. It can provide a sense of what the back-channel chatter is saying, or give context to more publicly stated facts. Even when people are saying untrue things about a candidate, it may be worth noting what is being said, but don’t put your credibility on the line.

This week has provided two examples of political tweets gone bad.

The kerfuffle over accusations that the Cruz campaign spread media reports suggesting Ben Carson might drop out have several lessons embedded, both for political social media and for professional politics in general.

Rule Four is the importance of following through all the way in messaging. In sports, we often hear of the importance of follow-through, whether it’s a tennis backhand, a drive from the green, or a shot in trap of skeet. Lack of follow-through can cause a shot to go into the net, fall short on the fairway or arrive behind the clay pigeon.

In Iowa, the Cruz campaign pounced on a story that gave them the potential to change some votes after the caucuses had begun. While they may have made some mistakes, they recognized that the caucuses were not over when the doors closed and the speeches began. But the Carson campaign’s failure to monitor social media and respond quickly to reports that might hurt them shows a lack of follow through that may have hurt their vote totals.

Applied to communications, Rule Four means that communicating your message should never stop short of reaching your goal.

Since caucus day, much speculation has centered on a single tweet by a college student in South Georgia, far away from the action in Iowa.

He has since addressed the hubbub surrounding that tweet, noting:

I think he was just commenting to his relatively small number of Twitter followers on what he was hearing about the campaign, and got caught up in after the fact blamestorming as everyone tried to figure out what happened.

The lesson for the Carson campaign is that if your Iowa ground game can be derailed by a single tweet from a student in Georgia, you’ve got bigger problems. And not knowing the Rules of Political Communication may be part of your problem.

Rule Five is “Understand the medium in which you’re messaging.”

Every communications medium has strengths and weakness, and understanding those is vital to effectively deploying your messaging platforms.

Twitter moves at light speed, but that means it moves bad information as quickly as it move facts. Don’t believe everything you read on Twitter unless you can verify it, preferably with a “real life” source. If you find something too compelling to pass without retweeting, understand the consequences you may face.

As to verifying information, that’s a standard practice for erstwhile journalists, but the immediacy of Twitter makes it too easy to pass on unreliable information. Witness Ann Coulter’s retweeting (since deleted) of an endorsement by a hoax Twitter account.

@RepStevenSmith is a well-known Twitter spoof that purports to be a Congressman from a Georgia District that doesn’t exist.

Retweeting a hoax endorsement of the candidate you support is likely to be no more than a passing embarrassment. Unless someone calls you out on it. But it’s a great illustration of what can happen when you hit the retweet button reflexively.