After an election cycle largely defined by Twitter moments, it's hard to imagine where campaigns on social media could go from here.
In a paper from a 2013 fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, Twitter's major role in this year's race was only hypothetical. Former CNN reporter and now head of news for Snapchat Peter Hamby delved into the way that intra-campaign conversations on Twitter shaped the communications of the 2012 presidential race. He believed that the value of being a "boy on the bus," or a traditional presidential campaign reporter following the candidate's daily happenings by traveling with the campaign, was steadily decreasing in favor of the easy-to-follow buzz generated by Twitter. In fact, Hamby argued that "Twitter is the central news source for the Washington-based political news establishment." But what particularly stood out to me was this tidbit toward the end: But according to {NBC News Political Director] Chuck Todd, it's all but certain that some candidates in 2016 will find a way to harness the social media beast and run with it.
Welp.
Let's take a quick peek at a "hypothetical" candidate, shall we?
Which makes you wonder - what comes next? (After draining the swamp, apparently.)
Will Twitter, despite its recent troubles, still be the leader for live postings and campaign news in 2020? Or will the next big thing be a newcomer like Hamby's Snapchat, virtual reality along the campaign through Facebook, or a nascent technology that hasn't even emerged yet? Maybe it will be Tinder for candidates, but with Snapchat's stickers and filters. Any candidate running for a top office from now on has to have a mastery of some form of social media, and it'll have to be organic. Watching Hillary Clinton, her campaign, and her core followers of female Baby Boomers try to figure out how to Tweet and Snap has been painfully awkward. You can't ask people to make memes for you - that's like Jeb Bush asking people to clap, and no one wants to go down that road again.
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