He may indeed be an old dog, but 74-year-old Sen. John McCain can certainly learn new tricks. Remember back in 2008 when he described himself as being all thumbs on the Internet and social media sites? Well less than three years later, he’s an Internet rock star who has 774,272 Facebook fans and 1.7 million Twitter followers and who jumped head first into social media when he tweeted with Jersey Shore bad girl Snookie. “You’ve heard about my tweet with Snookie?” he asks. “I’ve gotten more coverage from tweets with Snookie than any foreign policy or national security statement that I ever made in my life.”
[Read 10 Things You Didn’t Know About John McCain.]
In fact, that tweet showed McCain the power of the new social network. He used that model again when he tweeted that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak should quit. Yes, it was a brief way to deal with a serious subject, he says, but, “I was able to immediately reach out to 1.7 million people and a press release would have taken a long period of time and events were transpiring rapidly.” And he became immersed in the new media world when while traveling recently in Egypt, many citizens who had organized protests on Facebook approached McCain to praise Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. When he returned, McCain phoned Zuckerberg “and told him that he was a national hero.”
Blogs and social media are also changing the face of presidential politics, he adds. For example, while President Obama is raising $1 billion to run for re-election, a challenger can raise far less if they’re popular on the web. McCain says up to 80 percent of campaign dough pays for TV ads and “there are just not that many people watching television.”
[Read John McCain’s first person account of being a prisoner of war.]
But if a candidate has a good presence on the Internet, taking advantage of the free media, it could help to level the playing field with richer challengers. “It’s the new communication. That’s all there is to it, good, bad or otherwise.”
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