As more people use social media such as Twitter and Facebook, politicians and campaigns need to put more time, energy and money into reaching people there–but effectively. Grant Crowell over at ReelSEO recently analyzed social media strategies in politics. Here are some social video tips from for politicians to avoid political disasters and how to handle them properly:
- Be your own media hub. Take sensitive questions and address controversies through your own media channels.
- Treat anything you have ever put out online as public. It doesn’t matter if you meant it for someone personally, or even kept it for yourself privately. Remember, anything you upload is not a available to anyone for access.
- Learn to control the situation. Don’t feel the need to always have a live audience for everything you do and every message you need to get across.
- Don’t lie to us. The same goes to being evasive.
- Admit stupidity. If you are stupid enough to lie, at least admit it.
- Put things in proper perspective for us. Does it really affect the ability to do your job?
- Be social with video ALL the time. Rather than using social media and online video only to promote your campaign and deal with controversies, utilize it to build your social capital for anything in the future.
We’ve all witnessed the disasters: the infamous Katie Couric interviews with Sarah Palin or the topless photo of Republican Mark Foley sent to Craiglist. To the politicians and political hopefuls–learn from these social video disasters of others and realize that you don’t have a choice anymore. It’s a necessity to be honest, transparent and social online with us if you want our vote.
I appreciate this article! It is very informative! Well Done!
Thanks for the positive feedback! We’ve got a crew of very talented interns this season, and it’s always awesome to get opinions on different facets of social media. I wouldn’t be surprised if voting via Twitter becomes an option in this next election…
Did you really think you could get away with lifting my article and treating it like you’re the author, and it going unnoticed? Seems like you chose not to pay heed to my actual tips.
http://www.reelseo.com/social-video-politics/
“Be your own media hub. Take sensitive questions and address controversies through your own popular media channels: YouTube, Facebook, and your own official website.
Treat anything you have ever put out online as public. It doesn’t matter if you meant it for someone personally, or even kept it for yourself privately. Anything you upload is now a record that someone else can access.
Learn to control the situation. Don’t feel the need to always have a live audience for everything you do.
Don’t lie to us. Don’t be evasive with us, either.
Admit stupidity. If you’re stupid enough to lie to us, admit it.
Put things in proper perspective for us. Does it really affect the ability to do your job, or is it just salacious fodder?
Be social with video ALL the time. If you’re only using social media and online video to promote your campaign and deal with controversies, then you’re really not building your social capital you can use for anything in the future.”
Hi Grant! Correct attribution was not used in this post and we will remedy that immediately. Your post obviously inspired the author as its a very important issue right now. The points that you illustrate definitely not only play a part in politics but in every area of the online professional world! Apologies that proper credit was not given where it was due.
Even your first sentence is the same as my article. Are you really THAT lazy?
Hello Grant. I am just following up and checking in. I want you to know that I have been holding back commenting here until I could see how the blogger and editor would respond. I want you to know that we take plagiarism very seriously here at Abraham Harrison. We have investigated the situation and have come to the conclusion that this blog post wasn’t simply a mistake, that it wasn’t simply a new blogger — an Intern — sorting out blogging and sorting out how attribution and block-quoting works. It wasn’t, it was something else, even if it wasn’t malicious, it was neither acceptable nor was it responsible. The response of the blogger and the blog editor to your comments did not reflect the import of the situation, not did it correct the issue immediately. It is essential that we do not merely pay lip-service to an issue like this as Marketing Conversation is a very public face of Abraham Harrison and even the newest intern represents the agency equal to any article I write — so we must be triply careful.
I wanted to let you know that we terminated our intern weeks short of completing the internship because we’re a communications firm and we sell blogging products and services and we communicate on behalf of brands a clients and plagiarism in any form, even casually on a blog or on Twitter, without attribution, is deadly serious and surely worthy of termination. Simply put, it is not OK.
Jenna is in the process of putting together a blog post that will hopefully address this issue directly, specifically, and with the level of contrition that this serious matter deserves. Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention — to our attention — as this has been an awesome opportunity to teach and to make some implicit assumption into explicitly-documented expectations.
Hello Grant! I sincerely apologize for not using proper attribution. Although the mistake was unintentional, I take full responsibility. In hindsight, I know I did the wrong thing. I sincerely regret my actions and earnestly hope that you would be able to forgive me. I would like to assure you that I shall never resort to such means in the future.