In 2012, my predicition is that we will be at Web 3.0 and candidates will not be able to afford not to join the conversation and promote themselves through social media. We all know that Barack Obama had success in the 2008 campaign with using these tools. Lauren-Glenn Davitian gives a round-up and discusses what we have learned from that election.
epolitics has some good tips and information for candidates and how they can use social media and networking to win an election. This piece is focused on 2010, but it is applicable to the Presidential race in ’12. Also, Edelman did a great analysis on the Obama Campaign, best practices, solutions and comparisons.
Statistics show 93% of Internet users expect politicians to have a presence online and even a higher percentage expect them to be on several of the top 100 websites. This is a great statistic and proves that people want to see the politicians online and promoting themselves. By 2012, all of the candidates must be social media savvy. My suggestion is to analyze the most important tools that are available at the time, come up with a social media strategy, monitor/measure your outreach and results and tweak what you are doing based on those results.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr. They are all great solutions of how to promote yourself in 2009. If I had to guess, I would say mobile, wikis and video will be important in 2012. That being said, in 2012, I have no clue what the most important sites will be and noone can predict that but I am confident that the winner of the 2012 election will be active on those sites.
