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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

With the Republican primary races barreling forward, he took a breather recently to bring us up to speed on what’s been working on Facebook, what we can expect to see as the race continues and the strategy behind the governor’s new timeline page.

Romney was technically the second of the Republican candidates to create a timeline page, although the one that Newt Gingrich launched was on a separate page focused on attacking the opposition. Moffatt said:

Timeline is going to be really interesting because it will move the conversation to a far more visual interaction and emphasize the positives of the campaign. The app boxes and ability to pin posts and highlight stories will really make our Facebook page more dynamic and engaging.

While candidate Barack Obama’s Facebook timeline launched shortly after the layout was introduced, the rigors of a presidential primary race means timeline has been slow to appear on the Republican candidates’ pages.

(Gingrich‘s profile adopted the new feature earlier this month, while his official page has not, even though the former Speaker of the House created a separate page with a timeline that attacks Romney.)

Moffatt described the campaign’s approach to incorporating timeline on Romney’s page:

It takes a while to figure out how all pieces come together. We built third party apps into Facebook and had to determine where they work within the new real estate.

There were strategic challenges but timeline is overall a net positive. The ability to see our changes for a day before they went live was good.

The governor isn’t going to create any response to the attack on him by Gingrich’s Romney Record page, as Moffatt explained:

Politics is different than the corporate world, where there is a tendency to treat all brands positive. Governor Romney’s campaign is embracing what social media should be, which is not one-off pages.

The brief delay in seeing a timeline upgrade on the governor’s Facebook page was, Moffatt says, a reflection of how busy the campaign is during the primary fight, along with the resources at this stage:

Changing to timeline required a determinative approach with staff. We took an inventory of the posts and graphics in the old format, but we didn’t want to start something and then leave it in the cross hairs. Our goal was to build a timeline that was best for Mitt Romney.

Moffatt sees the campaign’s new Spotify playlist and Ann Romney’s Pinterest boards as a natural progression of Romney’s Facebook page:

We are always looking for those components, and understand that apps definitely feed into Facebook’s massive audience. As a campaign we ask ourselves where each tactic falls based on what we want to achieve on the campaign.

[Obama] is already in a general election mindset and is building out these Facebook components. We are going state by state and have to allocate our resources accordingly. Some things don’t make sense given where the campaign is.

Moffatt is confident that Romney’s campaign can go toe-to-toe with the president’s re-election team on Facebook and social media in general, if the former governor becomes the nominee.

In the coming weeks, look for the Romney campaign to introduce new features on its Facebook page as it pivots to more user generated content and introduce more opportunities for people to engage, participate and share content.

We just have to make sure we don’t start a conversation that we can’t finish. We don’t want to talk to people but with people. We never want to launch a feature and then have it not continue.

We asked Moffatt if he was concerned with the campaign’s Facebook engagement figures, which some studies show lag behind other Republican contenders with far fewer followers.

There are a lot of other metrics that define success. My only concern is to be cognizant of what people are saying on Facebook. We have the most engaged groups, and we saw high engagement figures with our recent Birthday Note to Mitt,which literally resulted in tens of thousands of fans signing the card.

The rest are just gotcha numbers. We know who we are engaging with, we monitor feedback and on any given day have 30-plus posts and that’s good engagement to me.

We asked Moffatt what makes a good Facebook page administrator on a political campaign, and he replied:

Someone who has worked on a campaign. The goal is not to have the smartest Facebook strategy but one that supplements the offline strategies of a campaign. Look at ballot initiatives. What’s the point of having fans and then can’t motivate those people to act. Facebook is only as good as the actions you drive them to.

Finally, we asked if Moffatt if he had any Facebook advice for other political campaigns, large or small. He said:

Facebook is the great equalizer. Campaigns don’t have to have a fully developed app system to leverage Facebook. You need authentic content and a system to get messages out. Campaigns need strong engaging content more than anything else.

Facebook is also a way for us to test messages for online advertising and other platforms, because it’s instant feedback that we can incorporate into search advertising. The platform is a great leading indicator.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Republicans were more active on the social network than Democrats. The GOP shared 196 posts to the Democrats 116. These details and more appear in an infographic from Socialbakers below — or click here for a larger version of the image. Let us know what you think in the comments section.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Users were posting their views on Facebook every few seconds almost as soon as the president took to the podium.

The opinions on Facebook varied wildly. Users commented on everything from the success or failures of President Obama, to the color of Speaker John Boehner’s tan and Vice President Joe Biden’s cold. We share some of the reaction at the end of this post.

The Congress on Facebook highlighted two members of Congress who asked for feedback on the speech from their constituents.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, and Rep. Bill Johnson, R-Ohio, both asked their Facebook supporters to share thoughts and comments on the State of the Union on their Facebook walls.

Doggett said he was “looking forward to attending” the speech, while Johnson asked what constituents were hoping to hear from Obama.

And the U.S. Politics on Facebook page featured remarks from the Republican presidential hopefuls, who weighed in before President Obama officially started his speech.

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels delivered the Republican response, and Facebook users were just as colorful in their comments.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The campaign intends to highlight Congress’ failure to extend the payroll tax cut, which Democrats claim is the fault of House Republicans.

While many in Congress have de-camped for the holidays, congressional leadership is still in Washington to negotiate a deal.

The cuts expire on December 31 and $40 is the amount families would save each week if the payroll tax cut was extended.

On Facebook, three posts that asked the $40 question has generated more than 4,800 comments, 1,725 likes, and has been shared 565 times.

A senior White House official gave a rundown on the numbers the social media blitz has generated so far to POLITICO:

• #40dollars, the White House hashtag representing the average weekly value of the tax cut, was trending worldwide on Twitter yesterday afternoon and evening.
• More than 10,000 submissions generated through a form on Whitehouse.gov, averaging over 2,000 an hour and coming in from every state in the nation.
• By 4:40 p.m. Eastern Time, the hashtag #40dollars was trending on Twitter, not just nationwide, but worldwide.
• Through the official White House Twitter account (@WhiteHouse has 2.6 million followers), the White House retweeted stories from Americans across the country.
• Data is still incomplete, but #40dollars has been used in over 1,000 Tweets that so far have , and that so far have generated 5.7 million impressions and reached an audience of nearly 3 million people, according to Hashtracking.com.

Today, a random selection of 100 people who submitted their stories will be invited to a conference call with Brian Deese, special assistant to the President and deputy director of the National Economic Council to further discuss how not extending the payroll tax cut will impact them.

Some pundits are claiming this impasse with House Republicans could boost President Obama’s re-election chances. The debate has certainly helped the president’s Facebook fan count.

According to our Election Tracker, the president has added 3,318 fans today and 29,400 fans in the past week.

What do you think of the White House’s social media campaign over the tax cuts?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In 2008, President Barack Obama’s campaign turned to the web to establish online call centers that encouraged supporters to raise campaign cash from the comfort of their own home.

Facebook is now a primary vehicle for not just sharing political information with friends, but also influencing friends’ views of politics.

Presidential campaigns are leveraging the power of the social networking platform to encourage supporters to raise money — and help their friends do the same.

Here’s a snapshot of three 2012 presidential contenders, and how each campaign is using Facebook to seek more dollars.

Newt Gingrich

Fans of the newly crownedfrontrunner in the GOP race can use the campaign’s Facebook phone call application to see which of their Facebook friends made calls and how many calls they’ve made.

That type of data sharing is a great way to help calls stay motivated and encourage friendly competition among supporters.

Mitt Romney

Supporters of the former Massachusetts governor can use Facebook to login to an online volunteer center, which includes a phone bank. He also sells campaign souvenirs on his page.

Romney has the most Facebook fans of anyone in the Republican presidential race, with more than 1.2 million fans

Barack Obama

The candidate who broke all fundraising records in 2008 by using web and social media apps is back in 2012, introducing new ways to employ current technologies to raise cash.

Supporters of Obama can use the Facebook page to log in to an online volunteer center that includes a phone bank.

It will be interesting to see how much money each candidate will raise on Facebook in the 2012 elections. Campaigns can offer the apps on Facebook, but it’s the committed and passionate supporters that will likely use the tools.

Should candidates use Facebook to raise money for their campaign?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.