NetGuido

The question is whether the media are the election but what are the technologies that promote the victory of a candidate for the Democratic nomination to the USA. If one follows the path of Mr. Barack Obama since the beginning of the year, the answer falls for itself: this is no longer large machinery media, CNN, Time Warner or ABC, which would bring a decisive advantage in the race for the Democratic presidential, but networks social on the Internet.


Facebook, Myspace (Murdoch) and all participating sites or blogs. While major “networks” traditional media still have the advantage of addressing the entire population, since television is still the main source of political information for 90% of respondents, according to a recent study the University of Pennsylvania [1]. But 42% - 55% of young people under 30 years - are already politically informed via the Internet. And most importantly, audiovisual media are now widely compete in a highly sensitive area: the financing of the election campaign.
This April 21 to 13 hours, Mr. Barack Obama is launching an initiative outside the common Internet address: it is to collect 1 million in 1 minute. Impossible? Last January, the man was able to exploit it to gather $ 32 million paid to 90% by donations of $ 100 via the Internet. In March, he still collects $ 40 million.
Some have seen a remarkable illustration of the “long behind” dear to Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired: is not that the weight of accumulating large audiences through mass media, but also together the many small audiences who are spread so interminable on the Internet.
Just compare the respective impacts of M. Barack Obama and Mrs. Hillary Clinton on Facebook. With 320 000 members of its network, the senator from Illinois will account sixty times more “friends” that his rival, with 5 300 affiliated with his group expanded. With 24 million viewings in one day in March, videos on Obama are three times more watched on YouTube than Hillary Clinton. Finally, it takes 161 000 members registered on Myspace in support of Obama against 43 000 to Clinton and 21 000 to John McCain, the Republican candidate. It does not need more to convince all the specialists of the American superiority in the line of Barack Obama. To the extent that its strategy on the Internet already refers to marketing experts who see the magic recipe to impose a challenger facing a brand leader.
Rishad Tobaccowala, director of innovation Publicis for example, does not hide it inspires them to convince its customers that the era of the Internet, a candidate “analog” as Hillary Clinton would have much less chance success of a candidate truly “digital” as Obama. At first the initial advantage of the notoriety, recognition of the establishment, the natural support of the media (as evidenced by a recent interview on ABC led in particular by journalist George Stephanopoulos, former bureau chief of communications Bill Clinton). But the second would control virtual communities on the Web with the idea should be left to each group for a degree of autonomy so that it becomes virtuous on the Web [2].
“Barack Obama has the three things that you expect from a brand: it is new, attractive and different,” said Keith Reinhard, chairman of DDB Worldwide, in an article published in April in the magazine Fast Company. “Obama achieves its best performance among young people, aged 18 to 29 years, that advertisers covet, the cohort known as the millennium generation - the Millennials - which exceed the number of babyboomers to 2010. They are black, white, yellow and various shades of brown, but what they share - new media, online social networks, a distaste for the sale of land at the highest or the lowest - connects more that traditional barriers such as ethnicity, not divide them [3]. ”
Let Keith Reinhard its conclusions on the resocialization that would allow social networks (the chances for a young disadvantaged out of the community are equally large sum through the Internet after a walk on a road). But note that the “performance” of Obama among young aficionados of the Web is not very surprising when we know that the candidate black enlisted the services of a co-founder of Facebook, Chris Hughes, 24 years to whom it must success of its site Mybarackobama.com.
From the “mass media” to “my media” Back to the Table of Contents
Presented as “the secret weapon of the campaign” Obama, a former Harvard condisciple by Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moscowitz, patrons founders of Facebook, has managed to bring half a million activists through 8 000 groups the Web. Its strength? An extremely dynamic 2.0, ie feeding on the participation of Internet users to the point of making the central actors of activism. Coming for the vast majority of the younger generation so-called digital native, who grew up with the Internet, these users are both invited to ask questions (to which the candidate responds, analysing the way the main centres of interest State by State ), And invited them to become emissaries on the Web spreading videos and starting to meet other groups, as Blackplanet.com, one of the sites of the black community.
The same is true vis-à-vis professional networks such as Linkedin: just qu’Obama will seek the views of business leaders on measures to assist SMEs to receive 1 500 responses [4 ].
This would force Obama, it would therefore have understood that America is moving from “mass media” to “my media”. As noted by Chris Anderson, author of The Long Train [5] in an Internet environment where the number of cultural references is increasing, there is no more Top 40 sources unavoidable, since everyone is able to devise its own classification. To access the crowds, it must be held unless at the entrance of shops on main roads that lead to population flows, whether search engines or community networks.
In the USA, according to Médiamétrie Netratings, Facebook had at the end of the year 2007 22.7 million users, representing a penetration of 13.7% of households. These Internet users, mainly aged 21 to 34 years, spend an average of 1 hour 09 per month on their personal account that is used to exchange private information but also videos, music or variety of content. In France, the phenomenon also takes the magnitude since, with 1.9 million users in December 2007, Facebook has seen its audience increase of 680% in the last half of 2007.
The social network raises critical of the use it makes of personal data: its founder Mark Zuckerberg has touted to advertisers sending advertising “hyper-targeted” according to the profile of users. Man proposes “to help brands to be part of daily conversations that occur every day” on the Internet by allowing them to create virtual profiles and distribute them to communities of “friends”. Without doubt, Barack Obama is already one of these major “brands” to be part of conversations on Facebook.