Politicians Interested in Social Media

I read with interest an article in the Oxford press about how web sites and social networking sites could be a potent tool for politicians. Really. I had not thought of that before.

I was shocked to read that Republicans and Democrats are interested in “social networking and user content sites like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube, which have proved wildly successful among the under-30 potential voters that Republicans and Democrats would like to reach.”

But moving on, the article did have some interesting observations on how politicians can use and react to, social media sites. Carol Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University in Washington is quoted as saying:

“In the same way that political reporters have seen that with blogs they no longer control the news media, candidates are about to find out that they no longer control politics,”

Don McDaniel, who has created a network of 600 Georgia Democrats through a site run by Democrats for America, a political action committee created by national Democratic Chairman Howard Dean went further by saying that:

“Candidates are really going to have to get back to listening to — and answering to — their constituents,”

But while the politicians talk a good game, getting then to walk the talk is a little harder as this story illustrates. Recently a Georgia Republican state legislator set up a MySpace account without filling in his profile. When Democrats called attention to the site, he discovered the site listed him —by default — as “single” and “doesn’t want children” because he hadn’t bothered to fill in his personal information.

The lawmaker, who is married and has two children, changed his profile immediately