If you’ve ever written a heartfelt letter to your congressperson only to receive an auto-response form letter in return, you know how it feels to be talked at – not to – by a politician. Letters to the editor don’t earn you much feedback either: you can write all you want but your elected representative never has to reply.
Social media has changed that. And woe be to the politician who hasn’t learned this lesson yet.
Take Martha Coakley’s botched campaign. Mid-term elections tend to go in the minority party’s favor, so I could forgive her for losing the social media numbers game to Brown. But she also committed the cardinal sin of disabling comments on her YouTube videos. Tsk tsk. If you’re going to put yourself out there on the Internets, you have to be prepared to take the good with the bad. And that includes friendly feedback from the other side of the political fence.
While Coakley’s social media missteps are more glaring given the role they played in helping a Republican take Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, she’s not the only one in Washington who’s tuning out constituents. Missouri’s Claire Mccaskill is the Senate’s most prolific tweeter, but when I checked out her Twitter page I was disappointed to see that she’s following one person. One. What’s the point of social media if you’re talking but not listening? You might as well be cranking out form letters.
Twitter is just one piece of the social media pie, one that blogger Mark Senak says nobody in Congress is using to its fullest potential. Even Candidate Brown, who earned praise for his social media campaign savvy, has to prove he can use FaceBook, YouTube and all the other online tools to their fullest potential now that he’s in office.
The Massachusetts race is just the kick-off to a year full of electoral contests. In every one, politicians will be frantically looking for ways to exploit the Web to their advantage. It’s up to us, the people, to hold them accountable for listening as much as they talk.
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