The 2016 election is sprinkling down on us like a mist that will soon spin itself into a hurricane. For many of us, the hurricane will mean boarding up our social media accounts to block the torrent of political memes, cherry-picked statistics and bar graphs that prove their posters' opinions.
For candidates, success will mean making their voices heard among the cacophonous winds. Talking heads will yap, pundits will pund, and wonks will punch their calculators, but when all is said and done one rule will prove true: Win Twitter, win the election.
Social media is a Super Bowl sized platform for free advertising. If a politician learns how to frack it, his or her message will echo through the loudest speaker ever created.
Kim Kardashian cut her hair short. But If you're under 30, well, you probably knew that. Kim has 28.6 million Twitter followers who got the message on their Twitter feed. Of those followers, 28,000 thought her new hair length was interesting enough to retweet to their own feed. The average tweeter has 200 followers, so Kim's message probably got out to another 6 million or so people for a total of 34 million. That's basically a primetime TV commercial, except nobody used their DVR to fast-forward through Kim's tweet.
Of course, so far, no politician can wield the social media sword like Kim can. They haven't put the resources into it. They're taking their television appearances, websites, campaign events and five-point-plan .pdfs and dropping them on social media like media platforms are made with cookie cutters. They're not.
Social media is supplemental. Think of it as slice-of-life, behind-the-scenes that you can only see on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Kim gets it, but the smartest communications experts in the U.S. typically don't. Perhaps she has a more natural grasp on the importance of minutiae than they do. Social media must go beyond the message. It's social media; if you treat it exclusively like formal media all you're doing is chucking a powerful platform in the wastebasket. Social media is the place to be human. To climb down from those aloof pedestals and walk among the people.
What stops politicians from using social media this way? Fear. Everything they do has to be ultra-sanitized. Every word they say has to be scrubbed down with isopropyl rubbing alcohol. Every picture we see of them has to be scrutinized under the lens of a compound microscope.
But this election, some candidates will take the risk and be rewarded. Some will solve the Twitter Rubik's Cube, and some will pull its stickers off it in desperation.
Marco Rubio tried to cash in on a trending hashtag like this:
"Who will win the #SuperBowl? Retweet for Patriots, Favorite for Seahawks. Then check out my winning playbook"
This kind of tweet is so corporate and transparent. Here's what a Twitter-phile sees:
1. Desperate begging for interaction with the old tried-and-trite "favorite" or "retweet";
2. An attempt to cash in on the trending #SuperBowl without making any actual contribution to the discussion;
3. And a tweet with no backbone disguised as the most unscientific of polls.
A tweet like this comes off as amateur. Now, if Marco Rubio expressed a real thought about the game, if the tweet was real enough for the reader to believe that it wasn't created in a digital test-tube by campaign scientists in white lab coats to be absolutely sterile, well, then it might catch their interest.
Right now (and color me unsurprised) Hillary Clinton is winning Twitter with tweets like this:
"The science is clear: The earth is round, the sky is blue, and #vaccineswork. Let's protect all our kids. #GrandmothersKnowBest"
1. Sarcastic tone;
2. Humanizing hashtag of her own creation along with a popular hashtag to score the views;
3. Taking a stand on something (though the stand is about as controversial as "murder is wrong").
The race has only just begun, but if the other candidates on both sides allow Hillary Clinton to corner the social-media market because she's the only one who knows how to construct a decent tweet, she's going to be the one stopping by the post office in January 2017 to fill out a change of address form. And she'll probably snap a pic of it with her phone: #backto1600.
Eddie Zipperer is a playwright and adjunct professor of English at Georgia College. His email is eddie@sockpuppetstars.com.