Mitt Romney campaign tweets had to be approved by 22 different people

Twenty-two.

That’s like having to get a tweet approved by every player on a football pitch.

22!

When Mitt Romney’s digital team wanted to send out a tweet during the 2012 campaign, it wasn’t easy for them. A new paper by Daniel Kreiss, an assistant professor at UNC Chapel Hill (and flagged by Brendan Nyhan on Twitter), finds that, late in the campaign, as many as 22 people had to sign off on the language of each tweet from the @MittRomney feed.

By contrast, what the Obama campaign got right wasn’t just having far less than 22. It was also moving fast when required, such as the example which opens the report:

On 30 August 2012, during the Republican National Convention, Hollywood star Clint Eastwood took the stage to lambast president Obama. What ensued was an odd, 11-minute monologue where Eastwood conversed with an empty chair upon which an imaginary Barack Obama sat. The evening of Eastwood’s speech the official campaign Twitter account @MittRomney did not mention the actor, while the Obama campaign deftly tweeted out from @BarackObama a picture of the president sitting in his chair with the words “This Seat’s Taken”. The picture was retweeted 59,663 times, favorited 23,887 times, and, as importantly, was featured in news articles across the country.

When it comes to moving quickly, the Liberal Democrats still have some work to do (hence leaving it to someone like me to respond quickly to a story like this whilst the party’s official channels were silent in the face of growing questions), in part because too many of the figures involved still see digital as something ‘over there, done by someone else’ rather than an integral part of all political campaigning and organising.