Measures of political involvement are down.

• In 2004, 63.8% of voters cast a ballot; in 2008, the rate was 57.1%.
• According to "Civic Life in America" released in 2010, 39.3% of people said they talk about politics frequently; the 2011 assessment found a sharp decrease in this number to 26%.
• The number of people who contacted a public official dropped from 10.4% to 9.9% in the last year, the same data found.

Social media usage is on the rise.

• In the U.S. alone, total minutes spent on social networking sites has increased 83% year-over-year.
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the 3rd largest in the world.
• 40 million tweets are generated every day.

Is there a relationship?







Last July, we asked "Can Social Media Reinvigorate American Democracy?" Based on a discussion hosted by the Brookings Institution, we posited three ways social media could possibly influence the 2012 Presidential election and give rise to citizen voice and democratic participation:

• Social Networks now act as "trust filters" for individuals in the political sphere and can seriously affect future political effectiveness.
• Many ideas and topics for political discussion will be introduced through grassroots networks where the public will have the power to push ideas that they value and think are important.
• Behavior advertising and geo-location will play a greater role than ever - allowing activists to cater advertisements to their audience and target specific populations.

While we noted the potential, only time would tell if these theories would actually be realized. So now that the 2012 election cycle is already underway via the Republican debates, caucuses, and primaries, what (if any) role is social media actually playing in the political cycle?

A story on NPR today (audio embedded below) cites Pew Research Center data that find only 2% of people sought election news from Twitter, 3% from YouTube, and 6% from Facebook. "Social media has been much harrowed, but relatively little used by average voters and average citizens," Andrew Kohut, Pew Center President said to NPR. "These numbers are very modest, given all that we've heard about the impacts of social networks on this campaign."

Despite attention being fixated on social media as a communication channel, the Pew data finds that one third of the population still gets its election and political information from cable news networks, even more so than newspapers or local television.

One-way communication can only go so far in determining public opinion on political issues. It is also important to analyze the context of television and tweets together in determining the tone of the public rhetoric. "Campaigns still occur largely on television-- the old media," says William Powers who works with Bluefin Media. "And Twitter is where the public is talking back to the TV."

Amy Webb of Webb Media Group suggests that traditional measures of political voice and opinion are "missing the point." She notes the ability of the tools to target opinion in hyper-local and demographic ways, which can be critical to political campaign success.



What do you think? Is the hype over social media and politics just that... hype? Or is it just not being measuring or talked about it in the right way?