How Candidates are Selling the Hashtag Election

The 2012 party conventions were a kind of coming-out party for Twitter as a political advertising platform. Over the course of the conventions, both presidential campaigns, the Republican National Committee, and the Republican-leaning super PAC Americans for Prosperity shelled out an estimated $120,000 each for a Promoted Trend -- a phrase or slogan like #RomneyRyan2012 or President Obama's #Forward2012 that appears on Twitter Web pages and on mobile Twitter feeds for 24 hours. Although the six-figure dollar amount is chump change when compared with the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on television, Twitter generates an outsized share of attention among political professionals and helps to form the narratives that pundits, journalists, and candidates will develop during and after big events.