Politics is people, but not people as an entity; it’s how the people feel about the candidate.
Following the present presidential campaigns, I realized something that shocked me:
Feelings matter a lot, some times even more than facts, and subsequently it’s not what it’s said but the significance of that being said that matters. And more important the conversations that those feelings create.
Politicians have realized just that, and they constantly try to drive the conversations in their meetings and their social spheres of influence. And nowadays those social spheres are based online. Like Twitter and Facebook.
We can read everyday at least one tweet by any presidential candidate, and most of those tweets are not about policy, but about making people react and start conversations.
Take the example of Donald J. Trump, some people like him and some people hate him, but even if people don’t like him; they participate on twitter, and that gives Trump more internet presence. Which in turn forms a virtuous circle, because the more presence he gets the more views he gets and more conversations start from those views. All because we love to participate in the subjects we love but we also love to hate things.
I obviously don like Trump's policies, I'm Mexican, but I must say that he's been very successful campaigning because he understands the social media game, he imprints his face and name in the people’s minds and then he’s just playing with pure emotions.
He knows very well how to turn on the heat of the online crowds and organize the flames.
He chooses what he (and his mob) is going to hate; it can be an ethnicity, a person or an idea. Then he inflames the passions of his online/offline crowds, and by doing so he creates a sense of intimacy between follower and leader. Leveraging this he can get his crowd to act, to rally, to tweet, to cyberbully, too yell, to support him and actively try to convert people into “Trumpism“. And when the flames are starting to die down he just need to pick another thing to love or hate and the process starts over once again.
