By Kasia Murphy
The recently announced – and at absolutely no surprise to absolutely anyone, at all – 2016 presidential election candidate Hillary Clinton has hired Stephanie Hannon, an ex-Google executive formerly responsible for civic innovation and social impact, as CTO. Hannon is the first woman to hold the title of CTO on a presidential campaign – not just a historical moment, but especially apt should Clinton win the title of the first female president of the United States. Responsible for managing the campaign’s digital operations, it seems Hannon has already passed the first test – Sunday’s campaign launch, characterised by a tweet and campaign video going live thereafter, went off without hitch. (Are the days of political fanfare rallies over?)
Interestingly, Clinton’s newly-formed team already contains a host of women in tech-related posts, including the likes of Katie Dowd as digital director and Jenna Lowenstein taking up the role of deputy digital director. At a time when cases about sex bias are dividing ranks in Silicon Valley, and reverberating worldwide, it’s exciting and heartening to see technology diversifying like this at the ‘very top.’ That said, we shouldn’t really be surprised by the move, as the keynote speaker at a women’s tech conference in the Valley earlier this year, Clinton called on women to “bump your heads on the glass ceilings that persist in the tech industry.”
Another thing we can take from this is that digital communication is now fundamental to election strategy. Indeed, it was Obama’s two campaign teams that were lauded repeatedly for their pioneering use of new technologies in their respective races for the White House. In particular, it was the fact that the second term campaign team employed some 100 analytics staffers to purposely mine through terabytes of data to gain the competitive edge. Of course, Obama’s campaign teams further redefined how individuals could use social media, smartphones and mobile apps (designed specifically for volunteer campaigners) to engage directly in the political process. Today, we can see the continuation of this legacy in the following statistics:
- Within an hour of her campaign's digital launch, the tweet Clinton posted to announce her second bid for the presidency had been viewed 3 million times
- Within three hours of the announcement, the launch video had hit nearly 250,000 views
- Half an hour after the announcement, there were 7,000 tweets about Clinton per minute
- Just 12 hours after setting up her first Facebook page, she had 600,000 likes
Social media enables candidates to engage in an instantaneous dialogue with voters, transforming campaigning into something much more dynamic and individualistic. (The same lessons can be learnt by consumer or B2B brands.) When looking to attract a new, digitally native generation of voters, using the myriad of technologies available is a must… Maybe Texts From Hillary will even get a new burst life? We can but hope.
Comments