Senator Scott Brown Is No Facebook Slouch

Volumes have been written about the strength of President Obama’s social media strategy in the 2008 election. Barack 2.0, as it has been dubbed, utilized already existing platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Meetup to engage the electorate. The success of Barack 2.0 didn’t rest on Senator from Illinois broadcasting his message out, but rather on the army of volunteers that responded and interacted with the public. The campaign made people feel apart of politics (many for the first time) and linked them to a piece of American history. Republicans have been struggling to find their place in social media. A few of the favorite fails from around the office that we found on TPM: (1) Newt Gingrich’s tweet that now Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is a “Latina woman racist, (2) Rep. Joe Barton boasted on Twitter that he’d “stumped” Energy Sec. Steven Chu by asking where oil comes from. Chu was indeed stumped — that someone who is apparently this dumb is an elected official (3)Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff (R) accidentally Twittered a public announcement that he was challenging incumbent Sen. Robert Bennett for the Republican nomination — he thought he was sending private text-messages to a friend. Enter Scott Brown. The Senator from Massachusetts made a remarkable run during the special election following Senator Ted Kennedy’s death to defeat heavy favorite Martha Coakley. His campaign was built on the idea of being an outsider, fresh blood, a people’s champion… all the normal dogma for trying to beat out an entrenched party machine nominee. Senator Brown must have kept the Barack 2.0 playbook near his bedside during his first couple months in office. He has been showing off his social media prowess engaging heavily on Facebook and Twitter. During a recent campaign to educate the Senator on the feelings of his constituents in regards to the clean energy bill, we sent a private Facebook message to the Senator. He responded immediately with the general prefabricated message as expected. But late yesterday evening we received an e-mail following up with a thank you and more detail on the Senator’s stance on clean energy.  This shocked us. His team either has implemented a tool for gathering social media metrics and contacts (think Radian6 of Jitterjam) or he has someone manually checking Facebook pages for public email address for users that interact with his page. Either way, kudos to the Senator for taking an active approach. Scott Brown shows that Republicans are closing the gap in social media know-how and Democrats will no longer have free reign.