Ep 133 Is Donald Trump the First True Social Media Candidate May 12, 2016

Is Donald Trump the first true social media presidential candidate?

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

Now folks, I talked about how Donald Trump has been an expert at Twitter. But there's a new school of thought gaining ground that Donald Trump is America's first true social media presidential candidate. And others have hearkened back to the day of fdr. Roosevelt, who was the first master of radio, his fireside chats were instrumental into his popularity and his elections and cementing his reputation. John F. Kennedy was thought to be the first true master of television, especially his performance in the first presidential televised debate against Richard Nixon. And now we're talking about Donald Trump being the first true true master of social media. Well, before you get compared to Kennedy Roosevelt, you need to get elected to office. Now I am recording this at the end of April in 2016. Some of you may be watching this in later years so you'll know who won the presidency. I am going to predict that Donald Trump does not become the next president. So I don't think he's going to be our first true social media president. But I do think he has set new ground, has been a trailblazer when it comes to his use of social media as a candidate and certainly at this time it looks like he's going to win the Republican nomination if not by straight out delegate counts, going into the convention, by having the most and getting anointed. Either way, I do think there are lessons here for candidates. The biggest lesson frankly is, is to have interesting ideas quickly go from your head, through your fingers or through an aids, fingers out onto Twitter, Snapchat, other social media as quickly as possible and not have everything vetted, refined, processed, homogenized and turned into bland mush. Now at some level it's obviously going to be a lot easier if you're an outsider, you've never run for public office and you can just lob bombs and attack all the time. It's easier to get Twitter attention. And candidates who want to not only win nominations, but win general elections and govern cannot be governed by the principle of just say the most outlandish thing possible at all times, which appears to be Donald Trump's main method and main principle. More on this in just a moment.

Do you have a speaking related question for number one, USA Today best selling author TJ Walker? For more than 30 years, Walker has been a public speaking coach and media trainer to presidents of Countries, Prime Ministers, CEOs, Nobel Peace Prize winners, professional athletes and Ms. Universes. Send your questions to infoediatrainingworldwide.com or on Twitter. J. Walker.

I believe Donald Trump's largest impact on the political scene is we're going to see candidates further down the ballot. Senate candidates, House of Representative candidates, gubernatorial candidates, and city council and state legislative races. I do think you're going to see more and more candidates trying to communicate directly with voters through Twitter, through Facebook, through Snapchat, and through YouTube video. And you're going to see more candidates relying on that rather than spending their money or their time raising money to do traditional direct mail and TV and radio advertising, because it's simply getting harder and harder to get the attention of voters through traditional media. As much as I'm a political junkie, if I see political mail come to my house, I typically just dump it right away. I did see today the first political ad on YouTube, I think, ever. And I don't know if they were doing demographic targeting. It was for a congressional campaign. I don't know if it was in the seat where I live here in Long island in New York. But I do think you're going to see more of that. But here's the thing. If you are targeting properly and you made a video for your YouTube channel, you can then target it to people by zip code in a very, very inexpensive way. So I do think that the biggest impact we're going to see of Donald Trump is a rise of candidates, not necessarily at the presidential level, who are constantly coming up with ideas that they want to share with voters, reactions to other candidates. And yes, that means we're going to see a lot more attacks, especially for anyone who isn't an incumbent and doesn't have the most money, because they are going to see the example of Donald Trump and say, well, if I just attack my opponent again and again and again, call him a moron, call him an idiot, call him a fool, call him a tool. I'll get attention. The local political reporters will talk about me. I'll get invited onto local talk radio shows and TV shows because they will want to talk about my attacks. Am I saying this is a great thing for democracy? No. But I am predicting it's going to happen. And at some level, it already is. There are some things that mainstream candidates and people who aspire to be president are simply not going to do because Donald Trump did them, because it only works for Donald Trump. He has created this Persona, not in this campaign, not in the last two years or five years or even the last 10 years. Donald Trump has been on the scene for 45 years, essentially ever since he was the brash young Broadway producer. At age 23 in 1971, he was going around talking about how great he is, how wonderful he is, how rich he is. That's been his Persona. And he caught this wave at just the right time where it allowed him to take over the Republican Party. Would it have worked five years ago? No. Will it work five years from now or four years from now? I don't think so. But that is not to take away certain skills and talents that he has that are transferable. John F. Kennedy might not have been the best TV performer ever, but he was better than Richard Nixon, and he looked better than Richard Nixon. FDR was not the most spontaneous, conversational sounding radio personality in the world. It wasn't better than Rush Limbaugh or the average NPR host, but he was better than Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge and other politicians of his time. So you always have to look at communication skills and political leaders within the context of their time and their immediate competitors. And Donald Trump is just certainly a lot better at saying interesting things on Twitter and social media than Jeb Bush was, or for that matter, Ted Cruz. The other interesting thing about Donald Trump that's different is that typically when people have access to mainstream media, they tend to be very slow to the game of social media. Well, Donald Trump has been in the mainstream media since the 1970s. He's had his own show on primetime on NBC. It doesn't get much more mainstream than that. And yet he is someone who has been quick to the game at experimenting with social media long before he ran for president. He would occasionally put out very sort of amateurish looking YouTube videos where he's just at his desk using a webcam, talking without a good microphone. And he used this to communicate with, at the time, hundreds of thousands of people. That's different. Most people who have their own show on primetime think, well, I'm too good for that. I'm too big for that. That's just for the amateurs. Donald Trump, to his credit, realized you can communicate at the highest levels of media and the lowest new levels of media, and eventually they sort of grow together and you put the two together, it's much more effective than just using one. So he's been a master at using high brow media, middle brow, low brow, and new media. And he also knows that if you say something inflammatory enough in a tweet, the traditional talk shows, the Sunday morning talk shows, a lot of them will be happy to have you on even by phone to follow up on your tweets. That's the other interesting thing about Trump is it's not just about replacing old media with new media. It's using everything together. Trump has been the master at calling cnn, some Fox shows, abc, calling in on a telephone. Well, that technology is more than 100 years old. And he realizes if you just pick up the phone and call reporters on the air, other than Chris Wallace of Fox News, most of them will actually take you on and you can get all your ideas out in the media even more. That is something I do think you're going to see more presidential candidates and politicians of every stripe doing. But the starting point is you have to say something interesting. And the problem for most candidates is you just don't have the luxury of being as wildly demagogic, inflammatory and as attacking all the time as Trump is. But if you can figure out something interesting to say, you can still use his tactics to get into traditional media, call the media, and dominate social media as well. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. May all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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