Hillary Clinton’s Social Media Acid Test

It’s interesting to me how social media has gone from guerrilla tactic for more progressive political campaigns, to a proxy for your ability to lead and relate in today’s upside-down political climate. Nowhere is that more clear than the heightened (some would say unfairly manufactured) drama around today’s presidential announcement by Hillary Clinton, the presumed-democratic front runner but one with a historically awkward embrace of the various social media platforms.

Think about it. Despite an impressive and wide-ranging career, all of the accumulated and most salient concerns about her candidacy will be on display via social media. Three examples come to mind:

1. Is she “real?” No one has ever doubted her intelligence but there is a “silent majority” that questions whether that intelligence ultimately channels into cunning and even evasion (e.g. Email-gate), instead of principled political efforts. Today we take it as gospel that social media is the ultimate Guantanamo, it will seek you out and surface for all the world to see any whiff of under-authenticity or character eccentricities.
2. Does she “get it” or is she behind-the-curve (AKA too old) regarding emerging technology or new cultural dynamics. We don’t elect presidents based on their grasp of new technology, but in an increasingly digital world technology becomes a proxy for other things we do care greatly about such as open-ness and adaptiveness, and Hillary has been stick-figured on such points previously e.g. when her State Dept employees cried out for open source browser access.
3. Can she reach and engage constituents beyond her narrow democratic political base, many of whom have tuned out traditional political campaign messages and get their “news” from Jon Stewart/Daily Show, or Buzzfeed. She intends to bring a formidable war chest($2.5 B credible threat) and a legacy of operatives and infrastructure dating back to the days of Bill Clinton presidency, but she was thwarted in part on her last goaround by a nimbler and more technologically savvy operator in Barack Obama, who focused more on Instagram backdrops than policy nuances.

Harkening back to the challenge of an ostensibly more experienced and qualified candidate in the landmark Nixon v Kennedy race in 1960, the TV-centric dynamics of that race tilted the scale just enough in favor of the more fashionable up-n-comer. Fairly or not, here too the burning question around Hillary may be just as much how she reacts on social media to last night’s SNL skit, versus her detailed policy papers on the world at large.

Postscript: her opposition has been readying for this moment, and the anti-Hillary posts are proving to be spirited and inventive. For a sampling try Twitter hashtag #NotVotingForHillary