At ABC's "The Note," Chris Good writes of the Republican National Committee's use of social media:
The GOP has officially entered the world of “likes” and statuses.
The Republican National Committee on Tuesday unveiled a new Facebook app, which party staffers say will augment or replace traditional organizing elements and shoot the RNC ahead of Democrats in social-media presence. Dubbed the “Social Victory Center,” after the RNC’s “Victory Center” field offices in battleground states, the app functions as a minisite within Facebook, where users see news items and party materials, including Web ads, curated by RNC staff.
It works like social readers that have been adopted by media outlets to spread their content on the Web: when a user reads an article or signs up for an event, the RNC’s app will broadcast that activity to the user’s Facebook followers.
“The DNC and Obama’s campaign haven’t really integrated in to social with an app lice this on Facebook,” said Andrew Abdel-Malik of the RNC’s political department, at a roll-out briefing with reporters on Tuesday. ”We’re constantly amplifying lots of activity,” he said.
RNC Political Director Rick Wiley touted the ability to share news, information, and announcements across state lines. “You might have someone sitting in New York City, but they have relatives in Nevada,” he said. “All of a sudden their relatives know that early voting just went live in Clark County.”
To go with its new app, the RNC says it will deploy new-media directors to each battleground state, in part to fill the app’s state-specific pages with new content–a first for the RNC, according to Wiley.
It also solves a problem the RNC has: too many volunteers in noncompetitive states.
“We have people in these red or blue states, and in the past we didn’t have anything for them to do,” Wiley said. Now, Republican activists can phone-bank online, technology that campaigns have already deployed. The app will dial an activist’s phone upon request, then cycle them through an RNC call list of independent voters in nearby battleground states. It’s this function that RNC staffers seem most excited about.
