The last few major elections either here in Britain or in America have regularly been touted as the ones where social media will play a massive role in the outcome.  AdAge reports today that the current Republican party elections have not seen the cross over from social media popularity to ballot box popularity.

The article suggests that this failure to turn online popularity into ballot box success is because people tend to require personal cajoling to get them to vote, which is something social media doesn't do very well because there is no face to face contact.  I'd like to suggest an alternative reason though.  We've seen numerous examples in the commercial world of brands failing on social media when they simply use it as a channel to broadcast sales messages at people.  By far the best exponents of social media use the channel to either solve users problems or engage them to help build the solution to their problems.

Do politicians do this?  One suspects not.  If they're not using social media to try and get money from supporters, they're using it to broadcast the message that they've already finalised.  Few politicians really listen to voters via social media, for many it is just another broadcast medium, not really any different to television or print, with the exception of course that they can generally control everything that's published.

This is of course a symptom of politics in general.  MPs of all stripes will gladly claim that they represent their constituents, but the vast majority have already got their views on subjects and merely look for enough support to air those views on a wider scale.  You never hear a politician say sorry or change their mind when they're wrong, much less canvass the views of the electorate before they do something.

So the problem isn't the voters, it's not the platform, it's the politicians.  Social media is just that, it's social.  In many ways it's a far more democratic system than the political one people are being asked to participate in.  We have a generation now where choice is demanded in pretty much everything they do.  The workplace is already beginning to change due to the demands of this new generation of employees.  Politics however is still lagging behind.  The victory by Obama in 2008 wasn't powered by social media enthused youngsters, it was older Democrats that voted him into the White House.  For many youngsters the notion of choice once every few years when they live in an environment of choice every few minutes is simply not appealing enough to get them to the ballot box.

That isn't to say these people aren't politically engaged, far from it.  It merely reflects that they are engaged in every facet of political life except the voting part.  One suspects that until our political elite embrace the social part of social media, it will continue to be a world they will not get.