The GOP and Twitter, What’s Next Time Travel?

If you can’t beat’em, join’em, right? This post should have its own category of “Too Little Too Late” but at least Republicans can now see that their party is not completely asleep at the wheel.

Sometimes it takes a good beat down to come to your senses and the GOP is admitting (as far as politicians will admit anything at least) to being behind the times with regard to new media in general. The article that explains this in great detail appears on the front page of the Wall Street Journal today. Either this is a big deal or a very slow news day I can’t tell but it is interesting to watch the change that social media continues to facilitate in all aspects of life.

The Democrats did a masterful job of attracting and mobilizing the social web crowd to get President Obama in office. I cannot personally point to any of the techniques that were used to do this simply because I avoid politics as much as I can other than to be informed. It would be great to hear from readers that can give some insight into the techniques and why they were so effective. The focus of much of this talk is Twitter and that is interesting because it could be the reason that the Dems did so well with Twitter is because many of their followers were already involved. The learning curve for the younger set is either non-existent or much shorter than those who would traditionally be considered Republican.

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Back to the GOP though which is actually a pretty big deal in social media. I say this because the social media space has gotten its start in the tech space and is steadily being adopted by more and more groups that you would never think would get it. I would have to put the Republican Party squarely in that group. Also included in that is small businesses. The part that must be considered by these later adopters is the need to evangelize this technique amongst those who wouldn’t get involved otherwise. This creates more work but it also creates great opportunity to shape your group with those who can help the most.

FT Takeaway: It’s time for all groups whether they want to or not to get their act together around social media. Acting like it doesn’t exist will get you the result you can imagine when you choose to just ignore something.