Social media takes on crucial role in recent SGB elections

Social media in Student Government Board campaigning has become a matter of keeping up with the Joneses.

At midnight on Oct. 24, Twitter was buzzing and Facebook was bursting with pages for SGB candidates who activated their accounts at the earliest moment possible. In the following weeks of the campaigning that culminates in today’s SGB elections, these sites would essentially serve as online bulletin boards where candidates could post platforms, photographs, events and various other information for students to view at their leisure.

As in the national presidential election, the use of social media has become critical to obtaining votes in smaller-scale, campus-wide elections. It is especially necessary because of the younger audience the election targets.

Sowmya Sanapala, an SGB candidate for Board running on the Stone slate, does not believe that candidates could have a shot at winning the election without social media.

“It is one of the main modes of communication at this point in all of our lives,” Sanapala said. “Social media is how we keep in touch with each other and is incredibly important for this election.”

Independent candidate Lauren Barney saw the success that President Barack Obama gained from the “Internet Election” of 2008, and she has attempted to follow suit. Barney has created a Facebook page, group and event.

“From the Democratic primaries of 2007 and 2008, I noticed the way that Obama pulled ahead of someone who was very established, like Hillary Clinton, was through the social media,” Barney said. “I saw the power it has. If they can get their name out there, this is more votes.”

Candidates themselves are not the only ones who are in on the Internet action. Many friends and supporters of slates — groups of two or more SGB candidates running together — take initiative by changing their profile pictures to photographs of their preferred candidates’ smiling faces.

“We’ve had a lot of our supporters change their Facebook pages,” said current Board member and presidential candidate Natalie Rothenberger. “We’ve just been having our friends reach their friends reach their friends in a network system to make sure that we’re reaching as many students as possible.”

Although Twitter has recently been increasing in popularity in comparison to previous years, Facebook still seems to be the forerunner of the social media enterprise.

Former SGB Board member Nila Devanath said that Twitter was not a component of her 2010 campaign but that times have changed only two years later.

“When I ran, Twitter was not a very big thing. It was generally for people just out of college or businesses,” Devanath said. “Now, Twitter is backpedaling. People in college are just tweeting about random stuff.”

Although current candidates utilize Twitter, they have agreed that Facebook remains their primary form of communication.

Despite the rise of social media, Barney emphasizes the value of face-to-face campaigning.

“I think it’s more important to speak to people,” she said. “Although [Facebook] is a great outlet for the distribution of ideas, it’s just not as great as going out there and actually showing students that they are more than just a vote. By showing them that they are a person, that shows more than just asking them to like your Facebook page.”

The addition of the online realm to the campaigning process has changed the entire dynamic of the election, according to former SGB president Molly Stieber.

“You should never base your campaign off of what other people are doing, but I don’t think that holds true when it comes to social media,” Stieber said. “If someone has a Facebook page, you should make one too. It doesn’t take a whole lot of effort, but it can reach a lot of people. You’re definitely at a disadvantage if someone is able to reach out to that many, but you’re not.”

The wide use of social media outlets has the potential to increase student voter participation from its hardly representative percentages. Although last year’s student body turnout peaked at 24 percent, it was a 5 percent increase from the previous election.

“You’ll see that the trend for elections in turnout has gone continuously up,” said Annie Brown, the chair of SGB’s Elections Committee. “There would be far less turnout and less people informed about it [without social media] just because it’s so simple to get on a laptop, which most people are already on.”

Many candidates have utilized their Facebook pages as a showcase to promote their school spirit and outgoing personalities. The Forbes slate’s page features photos of the candidates standing in the front row of a football game, hanging out with Pitt mascot Roc and posing in the Petersen Events Center during a basketball game.

“Throughout my four years, I’ve been very invested in enjoying the experience outside of the classroom, whether it be a football game or a walk in Schenley park,” said current Board member and presidential candidate Gordon Louderback. “I’m just trying to show that I’m a well-rounded person who loves my school a lot.”

SGB candidate Sarah Winston, running on the Fifth slate, believes that Facebook is a place where her slate can display its tightly bound unity.

“We are a pack, and social media shows that we are a team. So hopefully people will vote for all of us together,” she said. “We don’t take pictures apart. It gives a vibe to the rest of the campus that we work together. Showing the unity shows that we are in it for a long haul.”

In terms of outreach, candidates much create traffic on their Facebook pages by inviting as many people as they know. The Kessler-Larkin slate has also given friends and supporters administrator capabilities in order to bring even more accounts onto the invitation list.

According to SGB candidate Mary Mallampalli, the current chair of SGB’s Community Outreach Committee, involvement on campus has the potential to reflect the number of Facebook friends that a given candidate might have. She and the two other members of the PITT United slate, David Rosenthal and Connor Harbison, are all members of large Greek organizations on campus.

“Reaching out to members of our organizations has helped us to reach out to a lot more people that we otherwise would not have been able to reach out to,” she said.

The same holds true for Louderback.

“Being able to be involved in a lot of student organizations has allowed me to meet a lot of awesome people, and then I was able to connect to them through Facebook,” he said.

Although the slates represent different names and platforms, several of their Facebook pages contain noticeable similarities. For many of them, the featured photograph shows the candidates donning professional attire in front of the Cathedral of Learning, accompanied by the slate’s or candidates’ names in a throwback royal blue and yellow font.

Stieber noted that the template for the promotional photograph seems to prevail from term to term even as the elections evolve. She also utilized the same template and was inspired to do so by the president who ran before her. Present candidates appear to be continuing the same model.

“It doesn’t mean that it’s right or wrong. People have just seen that it worked,” she said. “While doing the campaign photos and Facebook pages and templates that have been done for a while is so great, [candidates] shouldn’t be afraid to branch out from that. If future candidates think they have a better way of running the campaign, [they should] try something new rather than something has been successful in the past.”

Sanapala called the recurrent theme a “tradition,” and she believes it is a part of how SGB elections have always been.

“I just remember seeing candidates dressed up in professional attire out front of the cathedral. You associate people with that image with candidates,” she said. “I can’t imagine how [a change] would be perceived. I think there would be a good amount of people who would appreciate the change or prefer the tradition. But there’s a certain degree of change every year, so it’s only a matter of time until we see something like that.”