Santa Maria Sun / Cover Story

Political hopefuls enter the Internet

BY SHELLY CONE

Best face forward Candidates are increasingly creating Facebook pages to connect with constituents and provide a little more insight into their positions on the issues. Some candidates also use Twitter to post short updates about fundraising events or endorsements. Those candidates using social media say they’ve connected with the community in a way they couldn’t otherwise. SCREEN SHOT FROM INTERNET

Considering the results—Obama is in the White House, after all—it’s no wonder the virtual momentum has spilled over into local governmental races, providing candidates with a better way to communicate with voters. Or not.

Katcho Achadjian, a candidate for the 33rd Assembly seat, relies on digital communication to a large degree. Running a campaign and attending to his Coastal Commission meetings and other responsibilities as a SLO County supervisor take him out of town often. You’ll find him keeping tabs on things via his Blackberry, and his Katcho for Assembly Facebook site gets 50 to 100 followers per week, he said.

“It has done an excellent job connecting us with the people,” Achadjian explained. “On a larger scale, we’ve witnessed how it helped reach people with President Obama’s campaign with great results.”

Achadjian said his Facebook followers will often read an article about this or that issue and ask questions of his campaign people online, where staffers are able to get them answers. It helps the team to easily connect with a number of people in a way that would otherwise require a full-time body to set up meetings or return phone calls.

“It is the least expensive way to reach out to the most people possible,” he said. “No matter where you are, you are able to communicate.”

That access isn’t always a good thing, he admitted. It can be informative, but also distracting.

 “I’m always staring at my Blackberry,” he said. “I used to make fun of my kids when they first got their cell phones, text messaging all the time. I’m 58 years old, and I’ve become just as attached to my Blackberry.”

Fellow 33rd Assembly District candidate Hilda Zacarias got on board with social media during her first campaign for Santa Maria City Council.

“The first [Facebook Page], my son actually set up for my run for City Council. Then he invited all his friends to check out what his mom was doing,” she said. “For us, it’s been a part of how we do things.”

Zacarias has both a personal Facebook site as well as a “Hilda Zacarias for Assembly” fan site. And though her team does help her with upkeep, she does much of it herself. During her interview with the Sun, Zacarias proved she wasn’t joking, as she perused her Facebook status.

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“So far, Zacarias is concentrating on Facebook and her website. She’ll join Twitter, she said, when she hits the campaign trail and has a lot more to update.

“The best way to communicate is face to face. However, this is a district of 400,000 people,” she reasoned. “Social media is a great tool for a representative to communicate with those people.”

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and the like continue to grow in popularity. Facebook boasts about 400 million active users, with half of them logging on every day, according to Facebook’s stat page. About 20 million people become fans of Facebook pages—establishing a connection with the person, business, group, or idea highlighted there—each day.

Other sites, like Twitter, have been harder to nail down, demographic-wise, primarily because users often access them through outside applications like their mobile phones. Royal Pingdom, a blog about the Internet and web development that provides services monitoring the uptime and performance of websites, reported that Twitter was home to 1.2 billion tweets in January—significantly more than just a few months prior. It’s expected that February will see 1.4 billion tweets.

Etta Waterfield has already found social media to be helpful in her campaign for 33rd Assembly District. Her online presence helped her not only secure supporters—it landed her a campaign manager as well.

Before she joined Waterfield’s team, Heather Moreno of Atascadero Googled the candidate’s name and found her website. She liked what she saw and invited Waterfield in for an interview with a group looking for a candidate to support.

“So here we are, two like-minded individuals, and all I knew was I was putting one foot in front of the other—but I was moving forward,” Waterfield said. “It was an interview with 10 people. Everyone had been on my website and had downloaded my issues. At the end, every single one jumped on my campaign and supported me.”

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“It’s a fantastic way to intermingle with people not only within the district, but outside the district,” she explained. “So many people are interested in you when you’re a candidate. They want to know about you and your views.”

People ask questions, but they also send articles or information they think might help Waterfield’s campaign. Despite her success with social media, however, Waterfield said there’s no substitute for one-on-one interaction.

Opponent Fred Strong disagrees with the need for social media in a political campaign.

“Oh, I’m interested in it,” he said. “I think it has a lot of value. But I’m already an elected official. I made a commitment. I have to do the job that I committed to do.”

As mayor pro tem of Paso Robles, Strong has to consider his day-to-day duties, as well as the citywide, regional, and statewide committees he participates in. Social media simply requires too much time, he said.

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Strong said social media only has value if a candidate is really reaching people he or she needs to reach—and if those people are actually listening.

 “It depends on whether they are using it to get to know you or just collecting friends,” he said. “Some people are just interested in how many friends they can get. That isn’t going to do anything for the people in my Assembly district. I have to do what affects their pocket books, what affects their lives.”

Matt Kokkonen is also running for the 33rd Assembly seat, and he’s aggressively using social media to grab the portion of voters who interact in that space and to catch up with the other candidates, considering Kokkonen entered the race later than most.

Using Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and YouTube—as well as incorporating e-mails and newsletters—the effort seems to be getting favorable responses, said Kokkonen campaign consultant Andrew Russo.

“This is an era in which the idea of a website needs to be more than a static brochure,” he said.

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“We get people responding to our e-mails and maybe wanting more information or posting things like, ‘You’re doing a great job, keep it up.’”

They’ve also incorporated a strong search engine optimization program, so when you type in Matt Kokkonen for Assembly, a lot of hits show up. Not all candidates’ websites come up when you type in their name in a search box.

“We have a very vigorous presence on the Internet, and I think it’s paying off,” Russo said.

“As with the issues, not all candidates agree on the benefits of social media. Steve Lavagnino, who is running for the 5th District supervisor spot in Santa Barbara County, believes face-to-face or one-on-one meetings are the best. To that end, he focuses on his website as a place for people to visit on their own time to learn about him and the issues.

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Lavagnino thinks people get bombarded by information already, so adding any more via Facebook or Twitter posts is an unnecessary intrusion.

It took me a while to get on Facebook as a personal option, and I’ve gotten in touch with people I haven’t seen in a long time, but I haven’t gotten anything of substance from Facebook, and I don’t think anyone will glean anything of substance from me,” he explained. “They won’t hear about the political issues, and maybe it’s just my circle or the people I’m around, but they don’t want to hear it on Facebook.”

He’s not totally analog, however. Along with his website, Lavagnino plans to do some online advertising and using texting as a medium to get his word out. But for the most part, it’s about steering clear from information overload.

“I still hope people are going to vote for people based on who aligns themselves most on the issues—not on who has the best Facebook page,” he said.

On the web Not all candidates are quick to jump into newer forms of social media. Fred Strong and Steve Lavagnino say social media takes a lot of time to maintain and doesn’t provide enough value to make it worth their while. They aren’t completely shying away from the Internet, though. Both candidates use their websites as a place to display information about themselves and their stances on issues. SCREEN SHOT FROM INTERNET

Joyce Dudley uses social media in her bid for Santa Barbara County District Attorney as a way of addressing people who may prefer the medium.

“I know people learn differently,” she said. “Some people like to hear it, others like to read it, and some like to view it.”

To that end, she has a Facebook account and posts videos of her speeches on YouTube.

Dudley is able to give people a more complete picture of who she is, as well. She explained that personal photos of herself and her dogs, whether they show her hiking with her pets or with her sons, are who she really is outside of her career. She carries that distinction one step further and uses Facebook as an opportunity to comment on some of the
cases she sees from a personal standpoint.

She admitted that there’s a downside to all this social networking. Anyone, for instance, can comment anonymously online.

“When I started out, you used to write letters to the editor,” she said. “They called you and your name was verified that you were the author. Anyone can comment on a blog. I think it loses that authenticity.”

She doesn’t use Twitter.

“I don’t want to know what people are getting at the grocery store and if they are on the way to a soccer game,” she explained. “It’s important to find a balance between simply communicating and encroaching on someone’s space.”

Her opponent, Joshua Lynn, was surprised at the responses he’s received in his social media campaign.

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Lynn said social media is a great way to open a dialogue with potential supporters, to get some insight into their thoughts and questions. He incorporates personal pictures, video, and thoughts on his cases into his pages. From time to time, he’ll include supportive notes or endorsements from others.

Lynn, too, said he prefers face time with members of the community, but agreed that social media is simply a reality in today’s campaigning. He referred to the Obama campaign’s use of social media as a standard, but he acknowledged that there are some difficulties with incorporating social media into a campaign.

“The one negative is it’s incredibly time consuming,” he said. “There’s only so many hours in the day, and I find I don’t get a chance to respond quickly enough.”

When he comments, however, the thoughts are all his, even if he isn’t always the one doing the posting.

“What’s the point of commenting if you are just using someone else’s ideas? But the mechanism for getting those comments in there—I don’t always understand the technology enough, and sometimes I have my 11-year-old daughter or someone else in the know post them,” he said.

Contact Shelly Cone at scone@santamaria sun.com.