The whole world knows how social media played a major role in propelling Barack Obama to the US Presidency a year ago. Through the power of Facebook and viral communication devices, he was able to tap the market segment that he normally wouldn’t have been able to reach.
Obama introduced new campaign tools. His website was not just a web site; it was an online hub, where his supporters can exchange information,” said Donald Lim of Yehey and Internet and Mobile Association of the Philipines.
Of course, a lot of people would want to use a formula that worked for the most powerful man (arguably) in the world.
In the Philippine election campaign circus, Noynoy Aquino recognized the power of social media early on. Even before he officially declared his intention to run for President, numerous social networks started collecting fans (the Web 2.0 version of signature campaigns) that called for him to run. And when he finally decided to take up the gauntlet, his supporters started working on his social media strategy. In fact, they immediately created a “new media team” which organized a web chat last November 2009 between select members of the media and the “reluctant” candidate, who admitted that it was his first time to interact with other people through the Internet. Although he was a newbie, he fully believed in the power of the World Wide Web.
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“We’re trying to reach all Filipinos not only here in the country. New media facilitates interaction. We would want to move into an issue-driven campaign rather than a personality-driven campaign. Issues will be vetted out here,” he said.
And judging from the number of his followers on all social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Friendster, Blogs, Youtube), it seems that his strategy is working. In fact, if you held the elections today on Facebook, Noynoy is the sure winner with 608,730 fans to date, with his nearest competition being Manny Villar, trailing behind him with 100,000 less fans.
Of course, critics question these numbers as being invalid because of alleged multiple accounts being set-up by supporters to increase their numbers. Some have even accused them of replacing the Cory Aquino fan page with Noynoy’s name, thereby inheriting all the unwitting fans of the late President, even if they do not support her son’s candidacy. Some advertisements in odesk.com, one of the leading global online job marketplaces, have surfaced, which shows Noynoy Aquino Supporters hiring freelancers to help push their social media campaign. Experts say this lessens the credibility of the purported success of his new media team.
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But in whatever way his team is actually gathering numbers for Facebook or Twitter, one thing that other candidates can learn from his strategy is that content is still king. If you visit his Facebook Fan Page, you can see that they have new posts every hour, from aggregated content colored with commentary to op-ed pieces on current issues. His rivals post 2 or 3 items a day, and most of them are spent belittling their rivals, which actually gives free publicity to their competitors and defeats the purpose.
Noynoy’s New Media Bureau, headed by Enteng Romano III, takes social media seriously by giving their readers and supporters enough content to make them come back to Facebook and the blogs over and over again, because at the end of the day, numbers mean one thing, but quality is still what keeps the interest going.
The question is, will the social media strategy work for a country that has only 24.5 percent Internet penetration as of June 2009? Yes, there are approximately six million Facebook users as of January 2010, but take note that our country’s population is at 97 million and growing. We’ll have to wait till May to find out if the social media can convert its virtual numbers into a virtual political majority.
