Twitter fills Clint Eastwood's chair

Candidates and political parties must now define themselves on social media ? or play defense.

So in addition to crafting and distributing a coherent message over the airwaves, the Republican National Convention was supposed to leverage social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit and others.

Instead, the four-day Tampa soiree saw its social media message upstaged by an empty chair.

During the RNC, President Obama showed his social media savvy with a surprise visit to the Ask Me Anything chat feature of the popular news-sharing site Reddit, taking questions from users for half an hour.

In contrast, Clint Eastwood?s rambling interview-gone-wrong with an invisible President Obama spawned an instant parody on Twitter by an anonymous person who both the Republicans and the Democrats ? who kick off their national convention Monday in Charlotte, N.C. ? should be trying to hire.

The @InvisibleObama account took the comedic material and ran, gaining some 50,000 followers in 12 hours ? more than Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan combined, according to OhMyGov analytics.

The ability to recognize memes is increasingly important for political messaging, but it?s driven solely by social media and bears no resemblance to conventional political messaging.

That brings us to the RNC?s dismal failure to ? prepare yourself ? engage with the empty chair. That?s right, even a parody can be a political opponent in this new social media minefield.

President Obama?s team realized this. They quickly tweeted an Instagram photo Thursday night of President Obama presiding over a meeting in the chair with the caption reading, ?This seat?s taken.? Instantly, they neutralized the threat of the invisible Obama.

?Oh no my invisible self didn?t!? tweeted the hilarious personage in response.

In another zinger, @InvisibleObama wrote: ?Hey Mitt, how about lending me some of those Cayman $ for a new Air Force One??

That was a reference to Romney?s comment earlier in the evening that President Obama will be relegated to a smaller plane in a few months. Any poor attempts at humor by Romney are now immortalized by the fictitious empty chair.

So as the Dems make ample use of the comedic material that has quickly become known as ?Eastwooding,? the official Twitter account of the RNC has fewer than half the number of followers as a fictitious chair. A social media fail if I?ve ever seen one.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bostonherald/jobfind/news/technology/~3/n_yPl5Dem_M/view.bg

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