Targeting Voters in the Digital Age Research Paper

Targeting Voters in the Digital Age - Research Paper Example Both Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012 are mirrored images of how voters are targeted in the digital age through social media. A popular opinion is that while the Obama campaign lead because of high interaction with the public and through extensive incorporation of social media and other creative applications, others candidates did not quite manage to adequately engage in dialogue with their voters. The candidates usually go all the way through to make use of the communications technology in the present age to get in the good books of the voters they target which is different from how they used to seek votes in the past age when communications technology and social media were not as powerful as they are now. This research paper basically attempts to scrutinize with the help of research literature how the voters are reached in the digital age, how this digital mania influences campaigns, why the Obama campaigns led over others when delivering their message, and how this whole process i s different from the way campaigns operated some decades before. Like other daily tasks of life are positively influenced by digital technology for example, the ease of depositing bills with our smartphones and listening to the candidates’ speeches online whenever feasible, the political process has also tasted the exciting taste of the digital technology. Both elections of 2008 and 2012 mad extensive use of social media and while â€Å"in 2008, there were about 1.5 million election-related tweets, in 2012 there were 31 million† (Jeffers). It is worth appreciating how through different riveting digital applications the political process is brought into the 21st century and made all the more exciting and comfortable at the same time. The electoral process is made modernized by the digital age and both digital technology companies and political candidates are set out to further modernize this process through employment of latest technologies available. There are many vot ing applications out there in the market presently which allow voters to find the required information about their voters and cast their donations directly to their favorite candidates with one single tap on the touchscreen. According to NYC Votes, voting is a very important ritual and it is their responsibility to bring all facets of the electoral process into the digital age by introducing new applications (Vanhemert). NYC Votes for this purpose has introduced two new applications, mobile web app which is a contribution tool and allows the voters to cast their donations to the candidates and lets the latter collect all donations on their smartphones and Voter Engagement tool which enables voters to find all they want to about the candidates, make donations, and much more. These kinds of things make the political process of elections seem very different to how the candidates reached voters in the past age when nothing was so modernized and all tasks of the electoral process were pa infully time-consuming. Research shows that one of the main reasons Obama presidential campaigns led over those run by Mitt Romney was that people behind the Obama campaigns took the power of digital applications like Facebook and Twitter really seriously and used them to their advantage in any way they could. Social media should not only be considered a change in technology as it is really a change in the public’s tendency to communicate (Jeffers). Research claims that social media was a sure