Social Media + Politics = ?

It can be good, bad and indifferent, or all three. 

Social media and politics sometimes works in the politicians favour (eg. Obama campaign 2011) orrr not so much (eg. Sarah Palin aka Tina Fey look-a-like, who really knows anymore) 

So all of these politicians trying to be celebrities, in my opinion works for only the cool ones, i.e Obama, and that’s about it. I’m not really sure how Obama actually gets away with being so cool, maybe it’s his publicist team, maybe it’s because he’s African-American, or maybe he is indeed a really awesome guy. 

People have seemed to put so much trust and faith into this person as through social media; YouTube videos and pictures on blog sites he has now become the most renowned president with millions of ‘fans’ all around the world. Even I’ll admit he seems like a fairly fun person. Is this because of social media we’ve seen this side to him? His fun loving, sensitive, humorous personality? Without social media he would just be a man with a lecture post talking to America about boring issues, no way would we have seen this side to him.

Just throwing this out there but Barack Obama has over 26 million ‘likes’ on Facebook and over 14 million followers on Twitter.

Or what about fan videos dedicated to him; this one has to be my favourite of all. Of course it’s fake but you wouldn’t be able to tell.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0CSWKpF8jE

This just gives a whole new meaning to the word ‘cool’ and the only thing this does for Obama is makes him seem better in the eyes of voters across America.
Aside from actually having a huge amount of street cred, Obama is the president that America needs, and has done a huge amount of work towards being that. I think this makes him all the more popular, not only being successful, but extremely entertaining and engaging. 

Social media and politicians sometimes just works and most of the time it just doesn’t. I think if the candidate is seen as someone fresh and cool, new on the scene, their publicists and media ‘people’ can mould their image and turn it into something amazing like our friend Obama here. Or they can try to turn them into something cool and it will just flop, such as our beautiful Koala look-a-like ex-Prime Minister here in Australia, John Howard. He is way too old for social media and that didn’t benefit him in the slightest. He’s the type of man who would trip and fall over once in his life, someone would tape it and he would never live it down. Whereas, back in the day, his opposition Kevin Rudd would trip, do one of his cheesy grins and girly laugh and it would be forgotten. 

This has to be one of the best newspaper changes I've seen;

Does anyone remember Rove’s segment called “Kevin Rudd PM” as a super agent? Google it if you don’t, or haven’t seen it. 

Anyway in the case of politicians and social media I think it shouldn’t be used as frequently as it is now, it clearly doesn’t work for most politicians and should only be carefully managed, as it can be detrimental to a new face in politics. Now that I think about it, what ever happened to John McCain? His social media exposure got him nowhere.

Now I’d like to share a personal favourite picture of Obama;