Social Networking Key to Brown’s Success
You were able to spread the word almost instantaneously from your own followers to your followers’ followers — a smart mob self-organizing to pursue a shared goal. Driven by a visceral fear that the lights were about to go out on the shining city upon a hill, thousands of believers in American exceptionalism began to apply the online social-networking skills they had developed as amateurs in the virtual struggle.
Starting December 9, the day after Scott Brown’s primary victory, bloggers like myself and Cornell Prof. William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection took Bill Kristol’s idea to make Scott Brown’s race a “referendum on Obamacare” and ran with it. We both communicated directly with the campaign through Facebook and Twitter. We burst out of our virtual worlds from time to time to help get out the vote by phone banking at regional offices. At campaign headquarters in Needham one day, Jacobson was actually kicked off the phone because he was spending too much time on Twitter! Blogging and twittering our on-the-ground experiences, from phone banking to informal exit polling, fired up our readers — from Massachusetts and around the country and beyond — to contribute and volunteer.
The campaign itself was totally social-networking savvy. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote, Brown “used Internet fundraising to put the fear of God into” the old boy network. If you were from out of state or unable to come in to one of the regional offices to phone bank, they had the technology to allow you to make calls from home.
Like-minded big-time bloggers like Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit and Michelle Malkin showered Prof. Jacobson, myself, and others with links. The message had gone viral, and the comments and tweets poured in, a groundswell of tea party fever that would bring in dollars and volunteer time to get out the vote and help sweep our long-shot candidate to an astonishing 52-to-47 percent victory. One in five Democrats supported Brown, “who benefited from high suburban turnout,” according to a Rasmussen Reports poll, enough of an edge so the Beacon Hill machine couldn’t cheat.
“Winning is fun,” fellow blogger-in-arms Dan Riehl of Riehl World View twittered on victory night, and the “beauty of New Media is getting local perspective.” Indeed, the ability of bloggers like Prof. Jacobson and others to use social-networking tools to share our experiences instantaneously with tea party sympathizers across the country is akin, perhaps, to the way Radio Free Europe was once used to give hope to oppressed peoples behind the Iron Curtain.
No longer dependent upon legacy media to tell our story, we are able — in Prof. Reynolds’s formulation — to disintermediate the old boy networks via the internet.
A good article. Very true.
Great job Sissy. On this article and on all your work over the past couple of months. I think Scott Brown owes you a bouquet of flowers!!
As I wrote back in May (in response to yet another clueless commentator):
If you had actually attended a tea party, you would know how foolish you sound when you claim they were organized by some shadowy right-wing cabal. The sound systems were inadequate, the speakers were passionate but mostly green, and the specific messages were as varied as we are. Few there had ever had cause to protest before and our inexperience showed.
But that will change rapidly. We now know we’re not alone in our anger, we know how to find each other and we’re learning to bypass roadblocks in the media. More importantly, we now understand that this is something that must be done.
And if there’s one thing that we do well, it’s get the job done.
***
Thanks for leading the charge, Sissy. Job well done.
Yes, remember local perspective?
Back when “journalists” were expected to maintain some objectivity, it used to appear on the nightly news. Now, it’s a Democrat reporter, either parroting what Obama wants or handing over airtime to a stooge who will, then attacking anyone who disagrees with Obama.
Keith Olbermann, Chris “Tinglebell” Matthews, David Schuster, Rachel Madcow, your ears should be burning.
Nice article and written very well.
I went to Sissy and Legal Insurrrection via Instapundit. I also generally check Dan Rhiel’s blog. So I was early on the Scott Brown story and had a bet that he would win. I originally said by five andthen changed to 11. I lost on the 11 point win but did win on the 5 points. I thought is was not impossible just difficult. Gergen idiotic question on how dare Brown frustrate the Kennedy dream of socialist health care by calling it Kennedy’s seat and Brown’s response also helped a lot. It was the first that I saw a candidate win a debate by debating the moderator. However Coakley’s fumbles had to play into it. The Schilling comment probably was the most damaging.
Brown’s local retail politics was very helpful. I had my county executive come to my door and even though we did not agree, I met him and voted for him because he trued to know his constituency.
Congratulations, Sissy.
I first found your site via Instapundit and, iirc, left a reserved comment about Brown. But then I threw him a few bucks for his “people’s seat” remark and a few more after thinking about how Coakley and Patrick have performed. And I contacted a friend to urge him & his wife to vote.
So thanks for your efforts and persistence.
Regrettably, my enthusiasm is more schadenfreude than anything else. Obama has taken only a year to generate the disappointment and betrayal I felt about Bush after four or five years, and I’m delighted to cast an important vote against him. The vile Coakley’s public career is probably over once her term expires. Those are good things.
Nevertheless, I don’t know if Brown will be a good senator or just the lesser evil. I see little evidence that today’s GOP would govern better than the Bush/Rove/DeLay crowd did.
Gridlock is better than where Obama/Pelosi/Reid are taking us, so gridlock gets my vote–but I’ll need a lot of convincing that a Republican government is better than gridlock.
Still, I’m glad I paid attention to you. I figured the chance was better than even that Brown would lose either legitimately or by hanky-panky, but consoled myself that I had not been passive so my conscience was clear. If I’d ignored Brown and he’d lost a close election, the thought that I might have made a difference would have haunted me.
So congratulations & thanks again.
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A handful of private sector jobs are in the smokestack, Wall Street-traded big corporations, with their big labor, big government alliance that stands as an elite few ruling the many. They are the ones stepping on the majority from where the wave and wake-making pebble-droppers come; the entrepreneurs who start the small businesses that hire the most people and shape the American economy for prosperity. Save Pebble Droppers & Prosperity, on Amazon.com and claysamerica.com, shows us how to create a vibrant and prosperous nation based on experience in America. Why not? Claysamerica.com
I don’t do Facebook or Twitter. No time. But I saw the power of what you described because I got all my information about his candidacy from sources who do. The first time I had heard about Scott Brown was in a column which mentioned the possibility of stopping ObamaCare if he were elected in a special election to fill Kennedy’s seat. The writer laid out the entire scenario which was very compelling. I e-mailed the column to several people and told them to pass it along. Before I knew it a whole bunch of people were curious about him and wanted to know more. It took off from there. When he had his money “bomb” we sent e-mails all over the place and within a couple of hours I got responses telling me we had contacted people who had pledged almost 4,000 to his campaign. It just spread from there. The internet kicked down so many barriers and made people feel involved and committed even from the comfort of their kitchens and living rooms. What an exciting time we are living in and to think millions of us can turn the tide simply by a stroke of the keyboard. I have raised and donayed money to Marco Rubio in Florida, as well as many others and the combination of all these efforts has sent a shock through the Crist camp. We can do this. YES WE CAN!!!
Sissy, thank you so much. This election shows that individuals can still step up and make a difference against seemingly overwhelming odds. I don’t think it can be overstated how much of an impact we will see from this going forward. Our country is still here and I have a renewed appreciation of how truly important and worth fighting for that is. In fact I think I may have been infected with Chris Matthew’s tingle! Thank you again for getting in there and blogging your fingers to the bone. All the best.
Correction: It is not Karl Rove who said, “They’re angry about the taxes, yes, but they’re really angry about the philosophy behind the taxes, and that’s collectivism.”
The person who actually said it, is Jonathan Hoenig. Follow that link you cited and verify it for yourself.
Rove is himself a collectivist of the conservative variety.
Thank you all for your great comments. We really do form a Reynoldsian Army of Davids that has been able to disintermediate the fuddy duddy powers-that-be. The enthusiasm, as they say, is catching!
Apple: You’re so right about the author of that quotation, Jonathan Hoenig, a Fox News favorite of mine. As you mention, he was properly credited in my blogpost:
http://bit.ly/ZyZii
I shall correct it when the article is counterposted on my blog Friday night.
Great job, Sissy! How does it feel to be on the bleeding edge of the insurrection? Seriously though, Sen. Brown (R-MA) really should send you a big bouquet… and put you on his payroll as official blogger and/or Twitterer!
Lots of focusing on yourselves in that article…almost sounded like the RNC’s statment after the Brwon victory in that sense.
The folks, twitters and bloggers that really swung Brown’s campaign aren’t even mentioned in this article…and certainly gave FAR more time, had FAR more reach and were FAR more of an impact than ANY of those mentioned..but hey, way to band-wagon glory-whore the situation.
Re:13 — I think you misread the message here, TheMA. Your access and participation in this race may have come via other venues, but that doesn’t negate or diminish what was recognized here. Instead of snarking, why not celebrate that this victory was truly a victory of everyday people all across this country waking up, fighting hard and contributing whatever time, money and enthusiasm they could through a multitude of means? In my opinion, it is precisely the diversity of our networks, uniting those with a common purpose, that will prove our greatest strength in the days to come.
Disintermediation + self-organization + direct communication… I’ve been watching that formula work in engineering for decades, and seen more than a few projects fail precisely because it was missing.
Congratulations not only on your publication here at PJM, but also on contributing one of the still-relatively-few pro-active articles currently published here. PJM has gotten stale with its constant drum-beat of whining critiques about the opposition, instead of DOING something about it. Your subject here is a critical element of that DOING, and we need more focus on it.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the media and academia must be reclaimed if the Republic is ever to thrive again. PJM had best get to pursuing this if it wishes to remain relevant. Criticism and sniping is easy – coming up with out-of-the-box ideas and practical alternatives to Big Government, along with a plan to implement them, not so much. I’ll be encouraged if I see more of your input here along the lines of the latter.
Cheers!!
An instant fund raising network didn’t hurt either, if this story, http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705359970/Brownaposs-win-in-Massachusetts-Senate-big-2-for-Romney.html is accurate.
It in no way diminishes Brown’s quality as a candidate or the appeal of his message to note that he had some powerful help in getting his message out, but I don’t think that element of his leap past a 30 point advantage for Coakley a month ago should be forgotten. He didn’t win on his Facebook page alone.
Leno vs. Letterman, When Celebs Attack
David Letterman has been sitting atop the late night Nielsen ratings since Jay Leno went prime time and Conan O’Brien took over the Tonight Show, a rare and heady experience for Dirty Dave which should end soon after Leno gets re-entrenched at 11:30.
It’s all good though. Conan is crying all the way to the bank with his wallet stuffed with $45 million NBC had to pay him and Dave is scared out of his worldwide pants that he will again become second fiddle to Leno’s Tonight show, a slot he’s been salivating for since Johnny Carson left the scene.
To demonstrate once again his lack of class and professionalism, Letterman has been relentlessly ripping Leno ever since news of the NBC shakeup became public, mimicking Leno’s voice, mocking his failed 10 pm “variety show,” blaming him for the fiasco, suggesting he stole his material.
Leno finally retaliated with an allusion to Letterman’s confessed infidelities: “You know the best way to get Letterman to ignore you? Marry him. He will not bother you. He won’t look you in the eye:” http://bit.ly/8qr6H0
If Leno thinks that will bother Letterman he has another think coming.
Dave shacked up with his long time live-in, . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1439)