Understanding the Gingrich Phenomenon (and his appeal to a younger audience)

Last summer, when all of the pundits had pretty much written off Newt Gingrich’s presidential candidacy, my niece, a college sophomore whom I always believed to be apolitical, remarked, “My friends and I like Newt – he tweets a lot on Twitter.” I should have remembered that. Two years earlier, I had heard Gingrich speak at the National Rural Health Association’s Annual Conference. At the beginning of his remarks, he took out his new mobile phone, and thus began a 30 minute dissertation on social media as the new paradigm in communications, and challenged us all to learn it, understand it and implement it. Gingrich, ever the student of history, grasped early on the significance of President Obama’s use of social media as an effective tool for communications in the 2008 campaign. Unlike Obama, Gingrich has had scarce resources and hasn’t had a cadre of aides, handlers and public relation firms to devise his social media campaign strategy. Instead, the 68 year-old former Speaker of the House from Georgia, whose campaign up until now has been just about a “one man band,” learned everything he could about social media and how to effectively employ it. As a result, he is now the one Republican presidential candidate who has mastered its use, and the results speak for themselves. Today, Gingrich has over 1.3 million followers on Twitter. His nearest rivals, Mitt Romney and Herman Cain, have roughly 170,000 each, followed by (Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com …