An excellent article titled “The Clinton Campaign’s Digital Organizing Strategy and the Future of Campaigns” has been making the rounds. In it, a campaign staffer explores some of the strengths of Hillary Clinton’s digital campaign.

Essentially, the Clinton campaign is asking/allowing campaign staff around the country a great deal of latitude when it comes to sharing posts on Twitter. As the author says, this freedom is in stark contrast to many other political operations:

Too many other campaigns prefer to stay in their bunkers, never trying anything new and take the safest path to Election Day based on whatever their polls tell them. Yes, there’s dangers to these methods. But there’s a much larger peril to not keeping up with the times and failing to embrace new ways of digital campaigning.

The ability of the Hillary campaign to embrace digital campaigning in this way is impressive to me, and represents a step forward in the world of presidential campaigns.

But it’s a very small step forward.

There are three aspects of social media management that represent a significant change from era of broadcast media: 1) decentralization, 2) humanity, and 3) engagement. Clinton’s campaign might be good at the first, but (so far) not the second or the third.

Decentralization

Clinton’s campaign boasts a decentralized voice: staff and volunteers are allowed to share a variety of things, and (it seems) are not even required to get approval from the central campaign when sending those tweets. Centralized voice is a relic of the a bygone era, and unfortunately still seems to be embraced by many candidates and politicians who haven’t caught on to what the Clinton campaign knows.

Social media offers the potential, however, for story to also be decentralized. When the story is decentralized online, things like We Are the 99% and #girlswithtoys happen. This can’t just be a central authority retweeting other people: it’s got to be authentic and people-driven. Decentralized story often requires leadership, but can’t stop there.

In addition to voice and story, social media can be used to decentralize the agenda. It is dangerous to cede meaningful control to your followers, but people are excited to be involved in a meaningful way. The first presidential campaign to solicit opinions from their followers and then act on those opinions will have officially embraced the power of digital media to decentralize in a meaningful way.

Humanity

Social media isn’t just about pushing power down and out to friends and supporters. It’s also about being a person. Maybe presidential candidates can’t always run their own feeds, and so as a result those feeds won’t be 100% personal. But they also don’t have to be 0%.

We need those semi blurry first person shots, those pictures of a funny quote seen on the street, an exciting movie poster. This is about demonstrating that candidates/politicians aren’t afraid of putting themselves out there in an authentic, not-always-perfectly-polished way.

Engagement

When candidates or elected officials use social media primarily for one-to-many engagements, they miss out on a great deal of potential. These engagements can not only be a welcome opportunity for the public to learn about and from politicians, but are also an important opportunity for the politicians to stay connected with the people they are representing.

Councillor Gaylord has cracked this code, as have John Curtis and Cory Booker.

John Curtis, the mayor of Provo, Utah and “the nation’s top elected official on social media,” regularly holds Twitter discussions with constituents. His discussion in May of this year garnered dozens and dozens of questions about topics from traffic to job openings, and Mayor Curtis responded personally.

Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey sets aside time each week to personally engage with people on Twitter. And he doesn’t just engage with his supporters — he often replies to detractors and even attackers. And then, when a constituent shared a collection of vegan recipes, Senator Cory Booker responded like a friend might:

Mayor Curtis, Senator Booker, and Councillor Gaylord engage more with actual people in a week than most presidential hopefuls will during their entire campaign. The closest thing I could find to meaningful engagement from Hillary Clinton was indirect mentions of people like Kelly Clarkson.