Social media will cause a decentralization of presidential campaigns during the coming election year, said Mindy Finn, a Republican political operative during a June 28 event held at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

Social media has become "the central nervous system" of campaigns, but with low barriers to entry for people and groups to create their own networks via social tools like Facebook, the biggest impact that social media will have on the 2012 campaign "is not so much how the campaigns are going to be using it, but how people are going to be using it to organize, to have impact on the election," Finn said.

Even President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign, still had centralized control over the my.barackobama.com website, Finn said. Campaigns are increasingly dominated by social networks, she said, adding that field representatives in charge of turning out voters in geographic areas are on their way to being replaced by "data desk organizers.'"

Campaigns are able to establish a closer connection to people through social networks "because we know more about them, we know more about who their friends are, we know more about the interests that drive them," she added.

Location services could also play a larger role than in previous elections, said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, who also spoke during the Brookings event. Ads based on people's expressed or implied preferences through social networks could also become big, he added.

But what social media so far has failed to demonstrably do, Rainie said, is to bring new people into the political process.

"There's no evidence yet that these new technologies--which are supposed to be empowering to people, are supposed to encourage engagement--have yet brought in a big new increment of actors to politics," he said. There was some data suggesting that occurred in the 2008 election, but the fact of Obama's candidacy itself made it impossible to separate social media variables from other factors, Rainie said.

For more:
- go to the Brookings event webpage (archived webcast available)

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