The Internet The Key To Win An Election Campaign

Essay aus dem Jahr 2010 im Fachbereich Medien / Kommunikation - Medien und Politik, Pol. Kommunikation, Universität Leipzig, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: The presidential election campaign of Barack Obama was declared as the first Internet- Campaign and in the American media there was talk of a transformation of the traditional campaigning. Hillary Clinton announced her presidential candidature in january 2008 not at a press conference but on the internet. “The 2008 campaign will be the first truly 21st Century presidential race.” wrote Arianna Huffington at The Huffington Post on August 02 in 2007. It is the same in politics as it is in every other part of our society: The internet becomes more and more important. Even the reasons are the same, the internet provides numerous considerable advantages which must not be wasted. Modern politicians from many countries have realized this and try to use the internet for their activities. The main aspect which makes the internet the number one medium of our society is its function as a communication platform. The amount of data and information available on the internet grows every day. Today, people use the internet not just to find information but to create and publish information themselves. Besides that, today the internet provides possibilities to publish videos, photos and even your own private thoughts and more and more people use that. In a way the internet has become more and more personal and it is like a huge bulletin board for everyone's own ideas. That is the advantage for modern politics, the internet provides the opportunity to communicate with people in a more personal way (than for example TV would do). There are two very good examples for people who have used all that with great success. Howard Dean ran unsuccessfully for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, nevertheless he is considered to be a pioneer of campaigning on the internet and especially political fundraising via the Internet. However, a perfect example is the election campaign of Barack Obama, whose online campaign applied a new standard. Nobody can deny that the internet is connected to nearly every part of modern society. Since more and more people use the internet frequently and a company like Google becomes more and more powerful, the internet has to play an important role in politics. By discussing the advantages of the internet as a communication platform, the advantages of the internet for an election campaign, and the examples of Howard Dean and Barack Obama this paper will prove that the internet is the key to win a presidential election campaign these days.

Communicator-in-Chief: How Barack Obama Used New Media Technology to Win the White House examines the fascinating and precedent-setting role new media technologies and the Internet played in the 2008 presidential campaign that allowed for the historic election of the nation's first African American president. It was the first presidential campaign in which the Internet, the electorate, and political campaign strategies for the White House successfully converged to propel a candidate to the highest elected office in the nation. The contributors to this volume masterfully demonstrate how the Internet is to President Barack Obama what television was to President John Kennedy, thus making Obama a truly twenty-first century communicator and politician. Furthermore, Communicator-in-Chief argues that Obama's 2008 campaign strategies established a model that all future campaigns must follow to achieve any measure of success. The Barack Obama campaign team astutely discovered how to communicate and motivate not only the general electorate but also the technology-addicted Millennial Generation - a generational voting block that will be a juggernaut in future elections.

After a self-assured John F. Kennedy bested a visibly shaky Richard Nixon in their famous 1960 debates, political television, it was said, would henceforth determine elections. Today, many claim the Internet will be the latest medium to revolutionize electoral politics. Candidates invest heavily in web and email campaigns to reach prospective voters, as well as to communicate with journalists, potential donors, and political activists. Do these efforts influence voters, expand democracy, increase the coverage of political issues, or mobilize a shrinking and apathetic electorate? Campaigning Online answers these questions by looking at how candidates present themselves online and how voters respond to their efforts-including whether voters learn from candidates' websites and whether voters' views are affected by what they see. Although the Internet will not lead to a revolution in democracy, it will, Bimber and Davis argue, have consequences: reinforcing messages, mobilizing activists, and strengthening partisans' views. Reporting on a wealth of new data drawn from national and state-wide surveys, laboratory experiments, interviews with campaign staff, and analysis of web sites themselves, Campaigning Online draws the most complete picture of the role of campaign websites in American elections to date.

Articles provide advice for candidates, campaign managers, and party workers on running a political campaign, including strategies, research, finances, advertising, and related topics.

Winning Elections with Political Marketing is a unique look at the election process on both sides of the Atlantic, providing rare insight into how modern political communication and marketing strategies are used in the United States and the United Kingdom. The leading political researchers present a cross-section of their latest findings, augmented with easy-to-read tables, charts, and figures, and reinforced with extensive references and bibliographies. The book addresses the key issues that define the interplay between political marketing and the electorate in both countries, including advertising, research methods and cross-cultural research results, political choice behavior, imagery management, the integration of business and social science theory, and the impact of political marketing on democracy.

Broken down into sections that examine new media strategy from the highest echelons of campaign management all the way down to passive citizen engagement with campaign issues in places like online comment forums, the book ultimately reveals that political messaging in today's diverse new media landscape is a fragile, unpredictable, and sometimes futile process. The result is a collection that both interprets important historical data from a watershed campaign season and also explains myriad approaches to political campaign media scholarship.

This book aims to further the research in the fields of social media and political communication by moving beyond the hype and avoiding the most eye-catching and spectacular cases. It looks at stable democracies without current political turmoil, small countries as well as large continents, and minor political parties as well as major ones. Investigating emerging practices in the United States, Europe, and Australia, both on national and local levels, enables us to grasp contemporary tendencies across different regions and countries. The book provides empirical insights into the diverse uses of different social media for political communication in different societies. Contributors look at the ways in which novel arenas connect with other channels for political communication, and how politicians as well as citizens in general use social media services. Presenting state-of-the-art methodological approaches, drawing on a combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses, the book brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers in order to address emerging practices of the mediation of politics, campaign communication, and issues of citizenship and democracy as expressed on social media platforms. This book was originally published as a special issue of Information, Communication & Society.

The Internet first played a minor role in the 1992 U.S. Presidential election, and has gradually increased in importance so that it is central to election campaign strategy. However, election campaigners have, until very recently, focused on Web 1.0: websites and email. Political Campaigning, Elections and the Internet contextualises the US Presidential campaign of 2008 within three other contests: France 2007; Germany 2009; and the UK 2010. In offering a comparative history of the use of the Internet as an election tool, the authors are able to test the optimistic view that the Internet is transforming elections while also mapping the role the Internet plays and performs for parties and candidates. Lilleker and Jackson offer in-depth analysis demonstrating how interactive Web 2.0 online tools, including weblogs, social networking sites and file-sharing sites, are utilised and evaluate the role of these tools in the marketing and branding of parties and candidates. Examining the interactivity between candidate, party, and voter, this important book will be of strong interest to students and scholars of political science, elections, international relations and political communication. It will be of value to those within public relations, marketing and related communication and media programmes.