In the mid-nineties a revolutionary public domain was released into the world, supplying an endless source of information and a new sense of connectedness. The Internet has brought the world closer to its manifest destiny, essentially connecting the east to the west, the north to the south, continents to continents. “The world is only getting smaller”, a proverb that seems to fit this situation in the most appropriate of ways. Within the last few years the Internet pioneers, AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy, have no longer monopolized the revolutionary industry as they have in the past. The upcoming giants offer a whole new array of aspects that make the older companies almost obsolete. These offers include an unthinkable amount of memory storage in web-based mail, a list of services, and most important a crucial source of revenue: advertising. Old media giants and the younger reconstructive companies, like Google, have recently been acquiring the most popular aspect of the internet: social networking sites that seem to be increasingly more than just a passing fade, but another way of life.
Throughout the past years, younger generations seem to find their relationships in the form of a personalized webpage forum. The cell phone and their counterparts, the online social network, provides people from every possible country an opportunity to create another home for themselves, as well as an avatar to represent their individual personas. Couples no longer need to search the endless waves of personal ads, dating websites, and speed dating events to find love, but now can design their own web-page, search through others, even create communities of friends to contact without leaving the comfort of their computer chair.
These isolated forums have recently been on the top of the priority list for advertising agents all over the country. The advertisers realized the immense popularity of social networking, and began buying the right to advertise on the sites. For example, the media giant, Time-Warner, bought a reasonable small networking site called, Bebo, for the small price of $850 million. The reasoning behind these types of purchases is simple: the popularity of the sites will allow a cheap, easy access to advertise to the consumers.
Initially the advertisers felt that people within these networks would purchase products found on the page and some sort of alert to their purchase would be announced. Following this advertisement push, public advocate groups began to fire back at the advertisers for violating the rights of social networking users. Although the initial release failed, advertisers and executives alike recognize the possible profit from these social networking sites. The new social networking “ecosystem” will be the frontier of new advertising methods for years to come due to the popularity and new sense of connectivity among friends using the websites. Anyone can post blogs, videos, games, and an endless amount of interactive elements that hold possible advertising schemes for television shows, products, and so much more.
From a political standpoint, politicians could use social networking sites in a number of ways to further their political campaign. The first interactive, internet-presidential debate was held during this election season, which allowed the public to submit videos of questions for the candidates. These candidates should consider the social networking sites as a possible outlet to regain the youth vote, which has never been very strong but has immense possibilities. By reaching out to the youth vote in their domain, a connection might be made, promoting intellectual debate among the youth as well as stimulating the desire to vote and become a productive Democratic citizen.
The incorporation of these social networking sites into the political campaign is crucial for the future success of candidates attempting to reach out and grab the youth vote. The Democratic Party, a liberal party that is greatly supported by a younger generation looking for social reform, could reach even farther into this demographic and pick up the necessary votes to close the door to a heated election. On the right, or the Republican side, they could greatly improve relations with the younger generations by establishing their positions within these generations. In the past the Republicans have only been able to rally a small portion of this age group, a group that typically votes Democratic, and have felt the loose in more ways than one. This is a chance for both parties to reach out to the younger generations, encourage participation during election season, and most importantly stimulate intellectual politically debate, which is necessary to the success of the Democracy. Advertisers and politicians alike should be equally desperate in acquiring these social networking sites. The survival of social networking on the internet is certain, but their use by the various elite of America is unknown.
2 comments:
You have a good topic here on how campaigns relate to social networking sites, and there are portions here that are very well written. My suggestion would be to cut back a bit on the first few paragraphs that deal solely with the relationship between major advertisers and the Internet. You will want to make politics and campaigns a more central part of this post from the very beginning, because it's not exactly clear how this first part relates to the later sections that are more relevant to the class. You do not seem to be saying that campaigns should merely be advertising on these sites, but that they should be using them to reach out to young voters and encourage them to become involved, vote, etc. which really goes beyond mere advertisement. The other thing that you need to incorporate here is the fact that several major campaigns are already doing this! So you need to talk about the extent to which they use Facebook and similar sites, and I think it would be useful to link to articles or sites that discuss how this has been done, or illustrate it firsthand. You may want to check some of the grammar and word usage in the post as well - fade vs. fad, etc.
It seems like there has been a large influx of using social networking sites for this election in particular. The candidates are really reaching out to the younger voter. It'll be interesting to see if this does effect voter turnout in November.
Because candidates are spending a significant amount of time, energy, and money reaching out to the younger voter do you think that this could alienate the older voter? For instance, could the senior citizens, who statistically have a very high voter turnout, feel that they are disenfranchised from the campaign? Also, if candidates just rely on the social networking sites to rally young voters doesn't that limit the face to face interaction?
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