What Pinoy politicians can learn from US social media

Chris Talbot, US-based expert on digital marketing in politics, sat down with GMA News Online staff recently to talk about social media use for elections and advocacies —a timely topic, with Philippine polls just around the corner.

 

GMA News Online (GMA): How important is social media today relative to other media?

 

Chris Talbot (CT): I can't speak for the Philippines, but in the United States, for a political campaign, it's not as important. As for news operations, it's the same thing: if you look at the big news stations in the United States, they're still looking at the Nielsen ratings much more than they're looking at their day-to-day web traffic numbers. 

 

But I think it's very important to know that one informs the other. Social media can drive traffic and viewers back to your traditional programming, and it's a way to stay engaged with those populations when they're not watching the program. Political campaigns and news organizations, they're thinking about social media oftentimes as ways to stay in touch and bounce people back to the program when the program's not on. 

 

So let's say you have a 30-minute program every day, everybody associated with that should have a Twitter or Facebook account that they could use to promote the show. So it's not just for the show's branding but also for the personalities around it. Twitter and Facebook are very personality-driven mediums, after all. The show has a Facebook page, and has a face of its own, but it's important to reinforce that with individuals. 

 

If you look at the Obama campaigns, there was a Twitter account each for the campaign, the different states, and Barack Obama himself —but so did the campaign manager and the two strategists. They were all used directly to communicate the message of the campaign. So it was the personalities around the campaign that were utilized. The same thing is true if you look at, say, the New York Times: every desk has an account. There's a New York Times account that kind of aggregates the biggest stuff but every desk has an account, all the editorial personalities have accounts, different bloggers have their own accounts. So utilize the faces of the program off-air, to reinforce what's happening on television.  

 

GMA: So basically, what you're saying is that you can have people off-camera helping to drive the brand?

 

CT: Yeah, that's absolutely right. If you look at social media, its interactivity creates an environment that people feel is more intimate and more personal. It's a great opportunity to go behind the scenes and, at least in the US, what we found is that there is a tremendous appetite for that type of content. 

 

We had a campaign once where the candidate's dog had a Twitter account, just to give a little background behind the scenes on what the person is like. If you have a program with one or two anchors —they should definitely have accounts, no question about it— but maybe the executive producer could have an account too. Definitely, bloggers and researchers related to it should have accounts as well. That's a way to give people a richer, more in-depth experience of the way the show gets created, how you guys pick topics.

 

So where is this all going? One place it's going in the United States is towards video, which is very good for TV stations. Because even though you see revenue quickly coming down from the other outlets like radio, and print, you see TV staying really where it's at. 

 

Even now that we're moving over to the Web, it's increasingly a video-based experience. More and more Americans are not just watching Youtube videos of funny-looking dogs on skateboards anymore. They're watching long-form programming, television-quality produced programming. They're doing it on sites like Hulu, which literally just show television as it shows online. They're watching Netflix, which isn't only doing movies, they're also doing their own original programming. So the web is becoming this avenue for video that is both entertainment-based and also news-based. 

 

GMA: What makes a good social media campaign? And do you think there's a need to separate personal accounts from their professional ones? 

 

CT: Yeah, I do. That can get tricky, because if you're known by your job and you already have a personal account, it's tough to switch it over. One of the things you see is that, in the little Twitter profile blurb, you say "Opinions here are my own and not representative of my company." That's always good to have. 

 

But if you don't already have a big personal following, you could shift the tone and style of your personal account. It depends. 

 

The overall concept you want is engagement. 

 

It's not just about posting. You want to post a lot but it's not just about pushing, it's about listening and getting that engagement back. That's the most critical thing. 

 

Any media outlet can push a message, but social media allows you to interact and get engagement in real time. Engagement is the one thing you should think about. In terms of tactical posts, you should never post anything that's just text. It should be photos or videos. Links are okay, but they should have accompanying photos. Even if you want to post something else, post a photo. If you want to post a link that has text or something like that, make a photo with the text embedded in it because that will get more shares.

 

GMA: What should a social media team's structure be like? What does it need to run effectively? 

 

CT: It starts with production, it starts with content. Everything starts with good content. And in politics, you really want to see action from the users. 

 

For example, when we do a post that's a photo of the candidate at a small fundraiser with a photogenic supporter who's giving $20, we say, "So-and-so just gave $20 to the campaign, can you match her donation today?" Tracking that activity through analytics is really important, and we would try to do that both online and offline. 

 

We want to track what they're doing online in terms of, Do they click? Do they follow through? Do they make a donation? Or do they show some other type of support? But we also have an analytical component on the back-end that identifies most connected users' real-life personalities: Where do they live? Have they attended our campaign rallies? What other ways are they engaged with our campaign?

 

So for us, the analytics of how people respond is oftentimes just as important as the other aspects of the team. Over time, that's incredibly important, so that you can effectively put resources against it and see what's working and what's not. 

 

The example from the Times is clear, because they saw more traffic coming from tablets during primetime and they said, "OK, we now have this audience that is engaged with our content the way that they didn't before, we need to figure out how to take advantage this." Without the analytics, they wouldn't have been able to come up with that type of insight. 

 

 

GMA: What are the particularly remarkable social media strategies that you've encountered?

 

CT: That's a good question. That Kony video that came out in 2012 was able to go viral and really attract an audience, for one. I thought it was very smart because they used typical social media stuff and tried to build the base. But they also frankly did a very good behind-the-scenes typical PR campaign at the time. They reached out to several major public figures with really really big followings, including Oprah. They showed them the video and got their support, so when they launched, they knew they had the support from all these key people. 

 

For political groups and for constituencies that are trying to move an issue forward, getting that type of support from what we call “surrogates” —people who may not be 100% with you, they may not be the spokesmen for your cause, but they support you and they have a large following— getting them to support you early on and building that early kind of energy can be really critical. So campaigns that are doing that are doing things really well. 

 

Campaigns use a lot of behind-the-scenes video, at least in the US. People try to show you what's really going on through video. Videos are powerful.

 

The 2012 Obama campaign did a very good job of this. They had very simple videos. For example, the campaign manager would be talking on his MacBook and he'd be like "This is what we're working on, this is what we think is gonna win this race for us, here are the states we're after." It tries to create a sense of what we call “ownership,” making your constituents feel like they have an investment in the campaign, that they're stakeholders.

 

— Compiled by AM Marzoña, edited by TJ Dimacali, GMA News

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Chris Talbot worked at Google from 2007-2010, and was leader of the company's Elections and Issue Advocacy team in Washington. He was awarded Google's Vice President Award in 2008.