Political Marketing: How Social Media influenced the 2008-2016 U.S. Presidential Elections and Best Practices Associated

Political marketing has become a growing facet of marketing that has infiltrated the campaigning of U.S. presidential elections. Within this cognate of marketing, social media has become a major component of predicting election outcomes starting with the 2008 U.S. presidential election. An analysis of the social media performance of candidates from the 2008 to 2016 U.S. presidential elections reveals how the power of social media can be harnessed to increase voter participation, connect voters to offline political activity, and engage voters with candidates on a more personal note. Social media political marketing should further emphasize the candidate’s brand and build followership through targeted messaging to desired segments. Social media continues to grow in use and bypass direct news sources; therefore, it must complement and create a dialogue with traditional media, as it will likely surpass it someday. To use social media effectively in political marketing, best practices are outlined in this paper with regards to content, engagement, security, platform selection, targeting, group membership environment creation, and display

Social media power and election legitimacy

Debate about the Internet and democracy has evolved from starry- eyed hope (Rheingold 1995; Tambini 1998), through critical realism (Zittrain 2008; Howard 2006; Sunstein 2001), to despair (Barocas 2012; Morozov 2011; Kreiss 2012). Recent elections have called into question the promise of the Internet to provide expanding resources for information and deliberation (Tambini 2000). Growing numbers of commentators argue that the Internet agora has been displaced by the monopolized Internet of “surveillance capitalism” in which a small number of immensely powerful platform companies (Zuboff 2015) provide integrated services of targeted propaganda and misinformation undermining campaign fairness by rewarding richer campaigns and those that are increasingly able to bypass existing regulatory frameworks. In recent elections, data- driven campaigns, supported by surveillance technologies that game privacy protection to profile voters and target their weaknesses have been widely criticized. (Barocas 2012; Kreiss 2012, 2016; Howard and Kreiss 2009; Tambini et al. 2017). Some, including Epstein (this volume) go so far as to claim that powerful intermediaries such as Google and Facebook can and do influence the outcome of elections. At the same time, the shock results of votes in the UK referendum and US elections led in 2016 to widespread questioning of the role of social media, which was seen as responsible for distributing fake news (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017; Tambini 2017), using manipulative psychometric profiling (Cadwalladr 2017), and undermining authoritative journalism (Bell, this volume; Allcott and Gentzkow 2017, 211) and ultimately the fairness and transparency of elections. This chapter examines the charge against the social media in recent elections, with a focus on the question of dominance: whether the powerful position of a few platforms in political campaigning— and particularly Facebook— is undermining electoral legitimacy. The focus will be on the UK, which has particularly high levels of online and Facebook use, and the referendum in 2016 and general election in 2017, which offer useful contrasting examples of recent campaigns. This chapter draws on interviews conducted with campaigners on the state of the art in targeted campaigning during the referendum in 2016, and a study of online ads used in the 2017 election conducted in collaboration with the grassroots group Who Targets Me

Facebook Ads, COVID-19, and Smart City Dissemination

This research provides an innovative strategy to disseminate smart city programs during the pandemic through Facebook Ads. Socialization of the smart city program was hampered due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The study used the systematic literature review method from various recent journals on the use of Facebook for the dissemination of public policy information. NVivo tools, qualitatively in-depth and comprehensive analysis will explain new methods’ findings in this digital age. Facebook ads were chosen because the field can target those who have an interest in smart cities. This study found that Facebook advertising as a digital platform for socializing smart city programs during the pandemic the public was more efficient in terms of time, effort, cost, and a wider target market. This study found an innovation, namely the use of Facebook advertising as a digital marketing platform in government affairs or the socialization of government programs to the public during the pandemic. Further studies could combine Facebook Ads with other platforms like Google Ads, SEO, and TikTok. Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic, Digital Platform, Smart Cit

Brand Obama: How Barack Obama Revolutionized Political Campaign Marketing in the 2008 Presidential Election

In 2008, President Barack Obama was named Advertising Age’s marketer of the year, the first time a politician won such an award. While presidential candidates have always employed marketing tactics in order to communicate their platform and persuade voters to support them, candidate Obama’s marketing campaign completely revolutionized the field. Through an innovative marketing strategy, candidate Barack Obama transformed himself from a mere political unknown in 2004 to a worldwide sensation by the time the general election started in 2008. His calls for “hope and change” and “post-partisanship” captured the hearts of Americans frustrated with failed Bush policy and constant gridlock in Washington. His inspirational speeches and words inspired a nation ready for a fresh and modern leader prepared to tackle twenty-first century problems. And, his innovative use of online and social media tools allowed millions of supporters to easily get involved in the campaign, igniting a movement never seen before in American elections. This paper analyzes how Barack Obama transformed political campaign marketing, utilizing both traditional and new ways to communicate and engage with the masses. This is accomplished by first illustrating a general framework for political marketing. Then, I examine the history of political campaign marketing, with a special emphasis on how technology has transformed the field over time. Lastly, I analyze how online and social media tools helped Obama win the election and how the internet has transformed the nature of political elections

Perils and Challenges of Social Media and Election Manipulation Analysis: The 2018 US Midterms

One of the hallmarks of a free and fair society is the ability to conduct a peaceful and seamless transfer of power from one leader to another. Democratically, this is measured in a citizen population's trust in the electoral system of choosing a representative government. In view of the well documented issues of the 2016 US Presidential election, we conducted an in-depth analysis of the 2018 US Midterm elections looking specifically for voter fraud or suppression. The Midterm election occurs in the middle of a 4 year presidential term. For the 2018 midterms, 35 senators and all the 435 seats in the House of Representatives were up for re-election, thus, every congressional district and practically every state had a federal election. In order to collect election related tweets, we analyzed Twitter during the month prior to, and the two weeks following, the November 6, 2018 election day. In a targeted analysis to detect statistical anomalies or election interference, we identified several biases that can lead to wrong conclusions. Specifically, we looked for divergence between actual voting outcomes and instances of the #ivoted hashtag on the election day. This analysis highlighted three states of concern: New York, California, and Texas. We repeated our analysis discarding malicious accounts, such as social bots. Upon further inspection and against a backdrop of collected general election-related tweets, we identified some confounding factors, such as population bias, or bot and political ideology inference, that can lead to false conclusions. We conclude by providing an in-depth discussion of the perils and challenges of using social media data to explore questions about election manipulation

Three essays on political economy

This thesis comprises three papers on political economy. We study how politicians are selected during elections in the first two papers. In the first paper, we study the individual characteristics (such as education, job, and experience) that render some candidates more successful than others. In the second paper, we study how information about a candidate’s characteristics affects voter behavior through a field/online experiment. While in the third paper, we introduce a new dataset and a methodological approach to retrieve granular precinct-level electoral results

The 2008 US Presidential Election and New Digital Technologies: Political Campaigns as Social Movements and the Significance of Collective Identity

The growing role of the Internet social networking sites (SNS) has served as a flash point for debate about the democratization of information, particularly in light of their perceived roles in the 2008 presidential election. This horizontal sharing of information undoubtedly facilitated the revival of the youth vote and volunteerism in many ways mimicking traditional grassroots approaches. While the role of the Internet SNS in mobilization efforts and information-sharing cannot be overstated, its effectiveness in creating a new “public sphere,” or transforming traditional electoral campaign strategies and communicative practices must be closely examined before generalizations about the democratization of media can be confirmed. In the aftermath of the election, theorists were quick to simplistically identify the use of social networking sites as key to this electoral shift. In this paper we attempt to advance contemporary theorizing of new media and institutional politics by examining specifically how and if ICTs (information communication technologies) and new media platforms are shifting the balance of power in terms of organization and mobilization away from the professional model and toward more democratic and bottom-up efforts. Reconceptualizing some of the basic theories of social movements and collective behavior this paper seeks to address questions such as: how are digitally enabled forms of mobilization affecting who becomes a participant; how do they affect organizational structure and leadership; how do they impact the dynamics of collective action; how do we address the powerful yet ephemeral effect of e-tactics established for short-term gains; can mobilizations succeed without collective identity and/or do we need new categorizations for collective identity; and whether e-tactics serve as a gateway for future participation

Politics in the Facebook era : evidence from the 2016 US presidential elections

Social media enable politicians to personalize their campaigns and target voters who may be decisive for the outcome of elections. We assess the effects of such political "micro-targeting" by exploiting variation in daily advertising prices on Facebook, collected during the course of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. We analyze the variation of prices across political ideologies and propose a measure for the intensity of online political campaigns. Combining this measure with information from the ANES electoral survey, we address two fundamental questions: (i) To what extent did political campaigns use social media to micro-target voters? (ii) How large was the effect, if any, on voters who were heavily exposed to campaigning on social media? We find that online political campaigns targeted on users' gender, geographic location, and political ideology had a signicant eect in persuading undecided voters to support Mr Trump, and in persuading Republican supporters to turn out on polling day. Moreover the effect of micro-targeting on Facebook was strongest among users without university or college-level education

Get @ the vote : using Facebook and email to increase voter turnout

This dissertation investigates the effects of the two most commonly used forms of digital media – email and Facebook – as mechanisms of voter mobilization. The widespread adoption of digital media in America makes it an idea conduit for voter mobilization, but to date there is minimal research that attempts to use Facebook to increase turnout, and few studies that use email to successfully boost participation. These studies leverage unique affordances of both mediums to increase voter turnout: Facebook increases the visibility of users' behaviors on the platform, and email messages and Facebook advertisements are inexpensive and easy to send to mass audiences. The results engage with existing literature on the power of social norms and how they can be used to drive behavior changes. To explore this topic, I conducted four field experiments designed to leverage Facebook and email messages to increase voter participation during the 2014 general election in Texas. These experiments adapt social pressure messaging, which emphasizes the public nature of voting records and attempts to increase the visibility of voting behaviors, for digital communication platforms. In implementing two of the studies, I developed a new method of conducting field experiments on Facebook randomized at the level of the individual that are implemented with the help of confederates. Results were analyzed using logistic regression. The most effective method – directly shaming people for failing to vote in the ongoing election – produced a statistically significant increase in turnout of 22%, which is much higher than what has been obtained through traditional analog methods. Directly praising friends for past participation was also able to raise turnout by 9%. Additionally, seeing others be praised for voting was able to increase turnout amongst new and infrequent voters. The second two studies build on past research by combining the email messages with Facebook advertisements and sending multiple waves of reminders. They show that multiple rounds of email and social pressure messaging can generate small increases in turnout. The findings demonstrate that Facebook and email can be used to increase voter turnout, and that the effects of mobilization within peer-to-peer networks are much larger than those obtained from unsolicited mass-email messages. This work contributes to existing theory by demonstrating that voting behavior circulates and can be induced through networks. Furthermore, the heightened visibility of user behaviors within online social networks was able to amplify the effects of the treatments beyond what has been produced in an offline context. Overall, the results show that digital media can be used to increase voter turnout, and offer reasons to be optimistic about the future of democracy in our increasingly digital society.Radio-Television-Fil