As the new administration gets to work addressing the numerous historic crises facing our nation right now, Americans’ record-low faith in - and in some cases violent antagonism toward - our government underscores all of them. Americans need to feel that the government is working in their interests, so it’s incumbent on the entire Biden administration to effectively tell the story not only of what they are doing to advance their agenda in and day out, but to do so in a way that highlights the positive and direct impact those policy changes will have on people’s lives.
Taking an aggressive and offensive approach to messaging how they are solving these crises to the American people is critical in order to both counter the disinformation from the right already at work to define the administration as a failure, but also to start to rebuild trust in our government among tens of millions of disillusioned citizens.
We’re just over a week into President Biden holding power over the executive branch, and are grateful to see his administration start to experiment with new ways to reach and communicate with Americans online that will be necessary to keep them informed about how the 46th president is working to help their families and communities amidst these crises.
In this week’s FWIW, we take a quick look at how they’re reaching Americans online. And, ICYMI, we’ve also got highlights from the big FWIW Debrief event we hosted yesterday for over 1000 of our FWIW friends and readers.
But first…
FWIW READS:
It was a big week for those of us following the intersection of media, tech and politics. Here’s what we were reading:
The past four years on Twitter dot com may have felt like four decades, but it’s important to remember that the president even having a direct digital footprint is still a very recent development. The White House Facebook page debuted in 2012, and the @POTUS Twitter handle didn’t even exist until 2015. But after the Obama administration pioneered the federal government’s online presence, the Trump administration weaponized that official presence to systematically spread disinformation intended to deteriorate our faith in the institutions they swore to defend and, more broadly, our understanding of reality itself.
So where does that leave the Biden administration?
For starters, they have a much smaller audience. Biden’s official FB and Twitter accounts have 10.9 million and 6.5 million followers each, which certainly isn’t nothing, but to put that into perspective, Lil Wayne has over 35 million followers, and before Trump got permabanned, he had over 88 million followers.
And while Trump may be in social media exile, the bad faith actors that enabled him are still around, and because Facebook’s organic content algorithms still favor inflammatory content like theirs, their content can perform better even if they have fewer followers. Here’s a breakdown of daily post interactions on Facebook between President Biden, Dan Bongino and Ben Shapiro, who have 4.3 million and 7.7 million followers respectively, courtesy of CrowdTangle:
However, it’s important to note that the Biden digital team DOES make A1 shareable content, such as…the White House fact sheet on their first climate initiatives, which was one of the most-engaged pieces of content on both Facebook and Twitter this week, according to NewsWhip. (FWIW, that spike in Biden’s interactions can be attributed to this post with Biden and VP Harris, which got just shy of a million interactions.)
We’re just a week into Biden’s first term, and as the internet changes constantly, so too will their digital strategy. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this story as it develops, so stay tuned!
IMPEACHMENT REDUX
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Almost immediately after the House of Representatives voted to impeach then-President Trump, Chuck Schumer wanted to convene an emergency session to begin the Senate trial immediately, but Mitch McConnell, clinging to his majority powers for dear life, said no. The Senate didn’t reconvene until January 19th, Biden was sworn in the next day, and now the line from the GOP is that it’s too late, so we should move on. This is obviously BS, and maybe they know that, but the conservative media environment is fully on board.
ICYMI: FWIW DEBRIEF
We’re extremely proud of the work our team accomplished in 2020, and in keeping with our commitment to building long-term infrastructure for the progressive movement, we’re sharing what we learned from our biggest digital programs to expand the electorate and help get Trump out of the White House. That work culminated yesterday afternoon with our FWIW 2020 Debrief event, where a number of our team members got together over Zoom to share publicly for the first time how our innovative programs registered, mobilized, and persuaded hundreds of thousands of hard-to-reach voters in the lead up to Election Day.
One of the critical tenets of our 2020 programming was a focus on developing culturally relevant and compelling creative that resonated with voters in a way that could emulate how they might experience their favorite reality TV show, corporate brand or pop culture moment. Take it from our former creative director, Victor Nguyen-Long, now a principal at Lockwood Strategy:
We tied up the afternoon’s discussions with a talk from our CEO + Founder, Tara McGowan, and our longtime friend and supporter David Plouffe, former campaign manager for Barack Obama, about how the progressive movement can move forward and continue investing in infrastructure that lets us quickly learn from our failures and build on our victories year after year after year.
Over 1,000 of you attended at least one of the sessions, but for those of you who didn’t we’ll soon have them uploaded, along with case studies, blog posts + more at acronymplaybook.com. And if you weren’t able to tune in to some of the discussions yesterday, we’ll have recordings at the link below.
