Entering the Gray Zone Between Internet and Politics

James S. Brady White House Podcast

Internet is the new revolution and it has become an indispensable component in our lives. We use internet to shop, to pay bills, to do research, to learn, to be entertained and much more. Apart from these, internet has also lately been gaining a lot of attraction from the political parties and with the advent of podcasts internet is proving to be one of the most favorable mediums for organizing political campaigns.

Not going much back in the history, we can take the recent example of President Obama’s internet based campaign this year in which his campaign team used social media websites like Facebook and Twitter to reach their supports across US. They even mailed thousands of mails to the people to appeal for vote and tried different kinds of strategies to win votes and to make money. These included asking for small donations in exchange for political coffee mugs and opportunities of winning a dinner with President Obama; all this via emails. Even the official campaign website of Obama helped the supporters to find the locations of local events which bolstered their campaign even more.

“The successful [2012] campaign is going to be one that integrates all the various elements of the digital channel – email, text, website, mobile apps, and social networks – together as one digital program and also mixing the digital program together with the offline reality of field organizations,”, cited Joe Rospars who is the chief digital strategist.

When the political campaigns started to falter they then turned to the political podcasts which again brought the attention of the supporters towards them. Internet media tools like social media and podcasts have today changed the way election campaigns used to be organized. You can easily get the idea of the power of internet to the political parties by the fact that Obama raised about whopping $500 million through internet based campaigns. In order to achieve this figure all he did was regular communication with his supporters via mails and sms. As simple as that.

With the social media sites like Facebook and Twitter swelling with new users with each passing day organizing and running political campaigns would become even more profitable. It won’t be wrong to say that within a few years the conventional political campaigns would become obsolete and podcast based and social media based campaigns would replace them.