Integration Technology

Although the technology to advertise through text messages has been available for some time, politicians are beginning to use this to their advantage. The article “In age of Facebook, Twitter and apps, some candidates adapt better than others” by Shailagh Murray and John Wagner, explores how politicians are gaining support and relaying false information onto the public through the use of such technologies. Robert Ehrlich and Gov. Martin O’Malley are the introduction to the article by showing their use of technology. The article claims that Ehrlich has 58,610 friends on Facebook, compared to O’Malley’s 24,516 friends. It is because of this that at the Saturday corn roast in Baltimore County, Ehrlich told the people, “That proves I’m friendlier, and more popular.” Such information, although true base on the statistics from Facebook, would be seen as false in the academic world since it holds no bearings on the actual polls since they are held in person and not through the internet. According to the article, “Obama’s 2008 campaign showed how the Internet could be used to organize grass-roots supporters into a nationwide political force.” Due to the rapid expansion and high perceived value of using the internet, many politicians and businesses have since invested large amounts of money to obtain the latest technology. During Republican Bob McDonnell’s 2009 campaign for Virginia governor, his campaign team “spent $150,000 to buy the very latest in texting technology.” However, this turned out to be a blunder because “the campaign had collected only about 9,000 mobile numbers, compared with more than 250,000 plain old e-mail addresses.” Harris, new-media adviser for McDonnell’s campaign, believes that it is not time for mobile yet. Although mobile text messages aren’t that popular for campaigns, Ehrlich is onto something innovative with his use of Facebook. Following the failure of cellphones, and the success of Facebook advertising, comes the introduction of the iPhone and other apple products into politics. Campaigners are creating apps for the iPhone and such in order to get the people more involved and Rob Willington, GOP candidate Scott Brown says, “What I love is, creativity can make up for the lack of bucks”. This is the true potential that the internet inherently possesses because it is cheap, effective, and takes little skill to create. Although the internet can be used for such good, it is taking away from the campaign sites that are now becoming less popular and GOP consultant Wesley Donehue believes that “If the politician is where the people are, social networks are going to become the new hub of campaign activity”. This is introducing the idea that technology and the internet, through social networks like Facebook and Twitter, will continue to grow in popularity and may eventually become the primary way to campaign, but we are still a ways off from this occurring. According to “Internet World Stats”, only 77.3% of the United States population uses internet (239,893,600 out of 310,232,863 people). Until 100% of Americans regularly use the internet and make it a facet of their daily lives, the internet will continue to grow in its use to campaign and advertise.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/07/AR2010100702662.html

http://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm