“Twitter is as it happens, and Facebook is the next day, and you optimize everything else for Google the day after,” says a Romney aide. Another Republican worries you can win the day, but lose the week.
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WASHINGTON — Almost immediately after Hilary Rosen said Ann Romney hadn’t worked a day in her life, the Romney campaign in Boston sprang into action — beginning to use long-dormant Twitter and Facebook accounts for Mitt’s better half, and aggressively challenging Democrats to repudiate Rosen’s remark.
Within an hour, the Romney campaign had forced President Barack Obama’s advisers to express disappointment with an occasional ally, and turned the attention away from critical analyses of Romney’s assertion that 92 percent of jobs lost since January 2009 were lost by women.
On Wednesday, Republicans flooded Twitter with jokes and riffs about a revelation in Obama’s memoir that he at dog meat in Indonesia, an absurdist answer to Democrats’ delight in raising an over-played episode in which Romney went on vacation with his dog, Seamus, in a crate on the roof of the family car.
That rapid, swarming response, led in part by Romney’s own staff, was indicative of the increasing Republican embrace of Twitter as a core messaging tool, and as a way to dominate the inside-the-beltway conversation.
Romney bragged about his campaign’s Twitter presence to a close-door gathering of donors over the weekend.
"We are behind when it comes to commentators on TV. They tend to be liberal," NBC News quoted Romney as saying. "Where we are ahead or even is on Twitter and on the Internet.”
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Twitter, despite its explosive growth, remains however a relatively small medium for the truest junkies.
At its peak last week, there were only 100,000 Twitter mentions of Ann Romney or her Twitter account @AnnDRomney in a single day — double Obama’s average on a normal day, but still a tiny fraction of the over 340 million tweets sent daily, according to the Twitter search engine Topsy. The hashtag of choice for the canine Obama jokes, #obamadogrecipes, was used 5,257 times as of Wednesday night, an impressive sum by the standards of a political Twitter campaign, but a tiny blip in the Twitter flow. The non-political hashtag #thoughtsduringschool, for instance, was tweeted 175,000 times during a single hour Wednesday night, according to Topsy.
One top Democrat described the Romney effort as an attempt to win the “Mike Allen, Mark Halperin, John Heilemann election,” but not influencing voters beyond the Beltway.
“They get one vote just like every other American,” he said. “The rest of the country isn’t paying attention to Twitter like those of us in politics. What matters is when you drive engagement off Twitter into real life.”
Senior Obama campaign officials questioned the strategy, and said it reinforced the view among reporters that the Romney campaign is not ready for the big leagues of messaging to the broader electorate.
