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 Next to the Democratic presidential candidate, 74, sat 27-year-old
Hector Sigala, his digital media director. For the next two hours,
Sigala turned Sanders' sometimes acerbic, sometimes funny running
commentary into a stream of 140-character tweets using the hashtag
#DebateWithBernie that stole the show - at least on Twitter.
Some 17 million people were reached during the debate, according to
the campaign's Twitter data reviewed by Reuters. It was the first in
a string of Twitter wins by Sanders during a presidential contest
widely viewed as a coming-of-age moment for social media in national
politics.
Sanders didn't even stop when the debate was interrupted by
commercials. When an ad for a new Tom Hanks film appeared, he
tweeted: "Tom Hanks. Finally. Somebody who makes some sense."
Eight months later, Sigala is a key lieutenant in the Sanders
campaign for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, one of a
new breed of digital media specialists who have become indispensable
in an election where platforms like Twitter allow candidates to
communicate with supporters easily, bash opponents or swiftly
counter-attack.
 Sigala goes everywhere – on dates, to parties and to restaurants –
with his black backpack and MacBook laptop just in case something
tweet-worthy breaks.
He was driving his cousin to the airport last Wednesday when Donald
Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, said women who
end pregnancies should be punished if the United States bans
abortion, comments that were widely condemned. Sigala pulled the car
over and tweeted: “Your Republican frontrunner, ladies and
gentlemen. Shameful.”
Sanders has close to 2 million followers on his Twitter campaign
account and has tweeted nearly 8,000 times. His opponent, Hillary
Clinton, has tweeted less, 5,000 times, but she has nearly 6 million
followers.
Sanders, however, has an edge because his tweets are much more
personalized than Clinton's, say some social media strategy experts.
"He’s been able to really resonate with (different groups) and
connect with them on a level that many other candidates have not
been able to do,” said marketing consultant and social media
strategy specialist Dr. Kay Green.
While Twitter could not provide data directly comparing the 2016 and
2012 presidential races, a spokesman said tweets about the Democrat
and Republican primary debates held so far have been viewed 9
billion times.
On Facebook, the number of interactions (likes, posts, comments and
shares) related to the 2016 election is up exponentially. Facebook
users engaged in 411.5 million interactions on average in January
and February, up nearly threefold from the nearly 142 million per
month average for all of 2015.
"The most obvious difference in the social conversations around the
2012 and 2016 presidential elections is, simply put, size," said
Kellan Terry, an analyst with Brandwatch, a company that tracks and
analyzes data from social media sites. "The volume of social
mentions around this year's presidential election is massive."
GHOST TWEETING
Sigala and Sanders met in 2012 when he interned in Sanders' Senate
office in Vermont. Sanders, he says, bonded with him during a stroll
down Church Street in Burlington, discussing a topic only Internet
nerds could love: net neutrality.
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Now, he manages both Sanders' and his wife Jane's social media
accounts. In practice that means he is the person tweeting comments
attributed to Sanders. On Twitter, "I am Bernie Sanders," Sigala
joked.
Twitter tends to attract more millennials, who have largely backed
the Brooklyn-born Vermont senator. The tweets and posts that get the
best reaction are those that appear to be directly from Sanders'
mouth.
"He used to come up with a lot of quips himself," Sigala said of
Sanders, but the rigors of the 2016 campaign schedule mean Sigala is
now often the one doing the tweeting.
Tweets about Sanders' bread-and-butter issues like climate change,
healthcare, race and gender typically roll off Sigala's fingertips
in a tone and style that would be hard to distinguish from the
senator's.
Take, for example, a tweet from Sanders' Twitter handle on March 18
in response to a debate over student tuition that was posted by
Sigala in the first person:
"Every public college and university in this country should be
tuition-free. I know my opponent thinks it's a radical idea, I
don't," it said, taking a dig at Clinton.
But some news events require Sanders' sign-off. On the day of the
Brussels bomb attacks, in which 32 people were killed, Sigala had to
wait hours before getting the go-ahead from a busy Sanders to post a
condolence message.
On a recent afternoon, Sigala was sitting in a Washington office
posting messages to various social media sites while a college
basketball game played on a nearby TV. When he isn’t live-tweeting
or reacting to breaking news, he’s referring to a Microsoft Word
document that contains 54 pages of prepared tweets on a list of
issues.
When he took over the @BernieSanders Twitter account last May it had
50,000 followers. He would check it obsessively each day to see how
many new followers it had attracted.
Now, with nearly 2 million followers, Sigala is less focused on the
numbers and more interested in figuring out which tweets perform
best. For example, he has discovered through trial and error that a
tweet reading “We have got to” do something will do significantly
worse than a tweet reading “We gotta.”
“That’s because it sounds like Brooklyn Bernie,” Sigala said with a
laugh.
(Reporting by Melissa Fares, editing by Ross Colvin)
[© 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.]
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