Social media as an instrument of effective political communication.

<p>This paper examines the social media as a instrument for effective political communication, on the example of the presidential election campaign in the United States and Russia in 2008. The election campaign of 2008 in the United States is the first case in the history, when the new social media used actively. Therefore, the goal was to: identify and describe why social media played an important role in the U.S. presidential campaign and how it works in Russia and why.</p><p>To achieve the goals, I set the following tasks:</p><p>- Identify the three main forms of social media, and then analyze them.</p><p>- Review and examine the use of social media in the U.S. presidential campaign.</p><p>- Review and examine the practice of using social media in the presidential campaign in Russia.</p><p>The results of paper are: social media extensively used in the presidential election campaign in the United States because of the high popularity and a large audience of social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Informal communication, donations, communication through social networks and other communication platforms allow Barack Obama to become the 44th U.S. president.</p><p>As for the Russian experience, our candidates did not use social media for their campaigns because of several reasons: small audience of social platforms (in 2008); elites specifically block the development of social media because of fearing to lose authority; Russian mentality (the imposition of Western as a stranger).</p><p>The first who was able to apply actively use social media in the election campaign was Alexei Navalny. As known blogger in the past, he tried to adopt the practice of Barack Obama. Something he was able to implement, something needs to be refined. But we can say that in the near future candidates will actively use the new social media to increase their votes, to improve dialogue with citizens and etc.</p>