If 2004 was the election of the blogs and 2008 was the election of social media, 2012 may be the election of mobile. Of course, elections are about all kinds of things but every election is about OVER-SIMPLIFYING. Politico reports on the Campaign Tech conference this week in Washington:
The conference featured tools that analyze the sentiment of social media buzz and behavior on Twitter and try to turn that into actionable intelligence on the campaign. There were also technologies that help connect voter profile data between offline and online data buckets.
It’s not just about getting a message out there, it’s also about tracking. A mobile device can be located, if the owner consents, and if that owner is a campaign supporter they might agree to share location data with their candidate from choice.
“The one thing mobile allows you to do is actually target, very differently, based on what the intelligence tells you,” said Julie Lam, CEO of Link2Tek, a consulting firm that works exclusively with Democratic campaigns. “I think you will see a lot more actionable intelligence being used within campaigning.” A handful of campaign professionals agreed Obama has a distinct advantage leveraging new technology. “The incumbent campaign is always going to have some kind of advantage when it comes to infrastructure,” Patrick Ruffini, a GOP political consultant, said, noting that team Obama has even hired a chief scientist. “Because he won,” Ruff added, “he has got the list there; he can remarket against the SMS list he already has,” he added.
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