The Twitter Two Step -- Reach of New Media and TV
G. R. Boynton
University of Iowa

There is hardly anything in our politics more dehumanizing than TV ads. There is hardly anything in our politics that people like less than political ads. There is hardly anything in our politics more expensive than TV ads.

So why did we do it? Why did I get 350 emails asking for money? Why did the money we sent almost all get spent on TV ads? To dehumanize us? To offend us? To make the TV production industry $2 billiion dollars richer?

The advantage of TV is reach. You collect a lot of money, give it to the television industry and many people are 'able' to see your campaign appeal. If it is a congressional district the reach is in the tens or hundreds of thousands. For senate races the required reach usually will be millions.

Campaign ads are old media. The first presidential campaign ads were in 1952. Campaign ads for congressional candidates had to wait for cable TV. Email, which is now being used so enthusiastically to importune us to send money, started in the 1960s. The software that makes it easy to do the mass mailing is more recent, but this is still old technology.

There is new media technology. Does any of it offer comparable reach? Microblogging, usually with Twitter, does if you understand the Twitter two step. With Twitter people may sign up to follow you; following means receiving all the messages you write. President Obama has 5.8 million followers and that number goes up all the time. Members of congress who have Twitter accounts have from a few thousand to a few tens of thousands. For neither the president nor members of congress do their followers give them broad reach into their constituencies. 5.8 million is a big number, but it is dwarfed by the number of people the president represents. But the followers of the president and of members of congress have followers. If they retweet the messages they receive to their followers there is an explosion in reach.

One of the attractions of Twitter, which makes it reasonable to assume people will do it, is that it is 140 characters. It is easy to write and easy to read. It is communication that is easy -- very low cost -- for both. And, unlike TV ads, it is cheap.

To show how the two step could work I counted. I chose a member of the House who had just been re-elected to her second term. She had just under 3,000 followers. That is not very many when compared to the number of her constituents. To count the followers of her followers I excluded everyone from out of state. That produced an interesting result. This member of the House had more followers from outside the US than from her constituency. And she had many more followers from other states than from her constituency. They were all excluded. I also excluded businesses, news media people, and others who seemed unlikely candidates for local organization. That brought the number of followers to 500, which is many fewer than 3,000. Those 500 followers themselves had 150,000 followers. If her followers would forward messages from her, which is very easy to do by clicking on a button, her message would go to another 150,000 people. And that begins to rival the reach of TV. And it gets even bigger than this. This member of congress tweeted 120 times in the last year. That was 120 times 500 contacts with constituents or 60,000 contacts. There were 338 retweets of her messages. If they went to the average number of their followers that added 101,400 contacts to the 60,000 thousand. If every follower had retweeted each message the total number of contacts would have been 18,060,000 contacts in a single year. And that is big numbers.

Retweeting on a big scale does not happen unless you ask. It does not happen unless you give people a sense of how it is important. And it does not happen if you are boring. But the reach can outstrip TV. And it is human communication.

From Local Organization to Television and Back

My wife and I are very modest campaign contributors, but during this election season we received 350 email messages asking us to send money. A record amount of money was raised for the campaign and spent. Where did the money go? Almost all of it went into TV advertising.

There was a time before TV advertising. The first presidential TV ads were in the 1952 election. Congressional campaigns had to wait for cable which solved two problems. It localized the audience reached by the ad and reduced the cost. If you were running for the House from a congressional district you no longer had to advertise to the entire nation.

What were campaigns before TV? They were local networks of people who interacted with a candidate, supported a candidate, and talked about his or her qualities with friends and neighbors. One of my senators, Senator Grassley, still advertises that he goes to every county in the state every year. He keeps the local networks alive. He does TV advertising as well, of course, but he has been in politics long enough to remember the importance of local organization.

Citizens do not watch the ads because they like them. They watch them because they have very little choice. They watch TV for entertainment. But very few find political ads entertaining. As soon as they can avoid them they will. The first blow in the competition for viewers was the digital video recorder. You record and watch the entertainment at your leisure. And you skip forward through the ads. The second blow has just been struck and that is the Google TV. There are no channels with the Google TV. You go to the web for the programs you want to watch. You cannot be forced to watch what comes in between because there is no in between. There will continue to be advertising because that is the way we pay for entertainment. But it will be harder to produce the forced audience that the current cable organization makes easy.

There is hardly anything more impersonal than political ads. There is hardly anything people like less about politics than political ads. There is hardly anything more expensive than political ads. The winners are the people who make a living producing political ads. Everyone else is offended.

There is a way back to local organization and a more personal style of campaigning. That is microblogging with Twitter as the current champion provider. The fundamental advantage microblogging has is followers. People volunteer to follow a candidate, and they receive all the messages the candidate produces. At the moment the president has 5.7 million followers, but no member of congress has anything even remotely like that. However, following does not stop there. Each person following a candidate has followers. If they can do what local organizations have done in the past -- pass the communication from the candidate to their followers, friends and neighbors, the reach becomes much greater.

How much greater? I counted. I chose a member of the House who had just been re-elected to her second term. She had just under 3,000 followers. That is not very many when compared to the number of her constituents. I counted the followers of her followers. I excluded everyone from out of state. I excluded businesses, news media people, and other who seemed unlikely candidates for local organization. That brought the number of followers to 500. Those 500 followers themselves had 150,000 followers. If her followers would forward messages from her, which is very easy to do by clicking on a button, her message would go to 150,000 people. And that begins to rival the reach of TV. And if she had spent some more energy inviting constituents to follow her those numbers could easily have been much larger.