“Risks Stream with Rewards in a New-Media Presidency”
In this morning’s Washington Post is a front page article on the White House’s use of digital and social-media. It covers a broad range of issues including the risks and rewards as well as questions about the effectiveness and provides multiple examples of social media’s use across a variety of media platforms.
As the first administration to come to power during “the digital and social-media revolution”, the Obama administration has created and responded adroitly to a paradigm shift in political communications and public engagement. Its embrace of new media is perhaps best captured in the fact that the 14-member White House Office of Digital Media is slightly larger than the entire press secretary’s office. And while the Obama administration has been criticized for “bypassing” traditional media, it has proven itself to be quite skillful in “leveraging the opportunities of the digital age to maximum political advantage.”
Directly relevant to our reading assignment in Chapter 15 on social media strategy are the multiple examples of how the administration has crafted messaging to “speak narrowly” to voters or groups.
The benefits cited in the article include:
- reaching more people without the filter of traditional media
- targeting its audience with precision
- almost immediate feedback
Risks cited include:
- the prospect of fostering further political polarization if communicating mostly with parts of the electorate that already identify with Obama ideologically
- concerns that “governance by social media will cheapen the power of the presidency by substituting hashtag activism for serious policymaking”.
Limitations of social media for political communication were best surmised in this statement:
“This is a medium largely meant to motivate the core, rather than a medium to convince.” Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication
It would appear the use of social media has become a necessity. According to the article, The Pew Research Center has found “that more than half of Web-using adults regularly get their political news through Facebook.”
Responding to that “new reality” the White House posted more than 400 videos to You Tube, which have been viewed for a total of more than 175 million minutes; produced 275 infographics for Whitehouse.gov; utilized Medium, Linked In, BuzzFeed, Instagram, and Pinterest, yielding more than 29 million views.
Echoing the theme in some of our reading this past week though is the question of whether all these efforts have been effective. While this outreach has spurred engagement, its impact on policy-making is less clear.
That reinforces the need for a strong understanding of the benefits and risks as well as having a clear and well thought out strategy for if and when social media are appropriate and suited to a particular communications and outreach effort.
The “micro-targeting” that was utilized in salvaging the bumpy roll-out of healthcare.gov where President Obama’s “Between the Ferns” interview drove more than 19,000 visits to the website within a few hours, more than 90 percent of whom were visiting for the first time was clearly an effective use of the medium with a difficult to reach segment.
But perhaps most important is the understanding of social media as simply a part of an overall communications strategy that can’t meet every need.
