Yesterday at the Personal Democracy Forum, Dan Sinker, the man behind the brilliant @MayorEmanuel satirical Twitter feed (you can read the whole story here), gave an interesting speech:
Watch live streaming video from pdf2011 at livestream.com
Near the end, he notes that for every important politician, there is an @MayorEmanuel just waiting to happen. In fact, there will probably be a hundred of them. Like everything else about contemporary media, it isn't really new, it's just that it has been exponentially increased in volume and democratized, so you don't need to be a writer for an established magazine to make fun of a presidential candidate. The real question for politicians is how they deal with this reality. As a certain New York congressman demonstrated, you can enthusiastically embrace social media and still be incredibly stupid about how you use it. As Sarah Palin shows, you can deftly exploit new media to circumvent the old media, but still be consumed, to your substantial political detriment, with whether someone, somewhere, is being mean to you on the Internet.
And you can either fight against the loss of control, or embrace it. This was one of the revolutionary things Barack Obama's 2008 campaign did. They realized that if social media were going to multiply the campaign's efforts, they had to be willing to cede control to their supporters. They had to let them write their own blogs, create their own signs, devise their own messages and strategies for reaching those in their circle. It went against everything political professionals believed, because iron message control is what every successful political campaign is supposed to have. And it worked.
But as we keep getting reminded, the politician's worst enemy isn't the supporter who undermines the message, or the parodist mocking them. It's themselves.
