by Karl Kurtz
Over at Stateside Associates Blog, Graham Grossman says that social media have replaced business cards:
The contact information contained on a business card was once the only means through which we would know how to communicate with an individual. The business card facilitated communication and collaboration by offering a phone number and an address for people with whom we wanted to connect. In the world of government relations, the same applied; we would collect cards from elected officials and their staffers, lobbyists, businesspeople and prospective clients, trade association members and many others. We wanted to communicate and collaborate with these people and the contact information on their cards gave us the means of doing so.
But times have changed. When was the last time you heard an elected official tell a crowd to stop by his/her regularly scheduled office hours? Office hours? They don’t exist anymore! Officeholders prefer to hold conversations on Facebook and their office is always open on Twitter. The most successful candidates tell their supporters to Like them on Facebook, they regularly give out their website address, they ask supporters to forward their e-newsletters to friends and they count on voters stumbling across their website through a search engine result. Most politicians are savvy to how the game has changed.
Well, I'm not sure that elected officials have completely given up office hours, but I'm willing to grant Graham a bit of hyperbole to support his argument. The point that business cards are used less often these days is an interesting one. I certainly don't reorder them as often as I used to, and I can't remember when I last used a Rolodex. Social media and online databases have definitely added a new dimension to how we communicate.
Yet, however much social media have changed the world of elected officials, let's not lose track of the fact that Facebook, Twitter and e-mail will never replace the face-to-face human interactions that are the very stuff of politics: the door-to-door campaigning, the meetings and phone calls with constituents and lobbyists, the conferences with fellow members, the interviews with the media.... Most state legislators in my experience are like a long-ago speaker of the Minnesota House who once said, "I don't learn the most important things from reading; I learn them from talking to people."
The virtual legislature connected primarily by the Web, e-mail, remote conferencing and social media is not coming anytime soon.
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