Staffers on Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 presidential campaign revealed that the primary reason why its social media campaign was not nearly as successful as President Barack Obama’s was because Romney's was committee-approved to death, according to an academic paper published [PDF] on Friday.

Zac Moffatt, the Romney campaign’s digital director, quipped to researcher Daniel Kreiss, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina, that the campaign had "the best tweets ever written by 17 people."

Another staffer, Caitlin Checkett, described the myriad of checks the campaign had imposed on itself, which got worse over time.

So whether it was a tweet, Facebook post, blog post, photo—anything you could imagine—it had to be sent around to everyone for approval. Towards the end of the campaign that was 22 individuals who had to approve it. ... The digital team unfortunately did not have the opportunity to think of things on their own and post them. ... The downfall of that of course is as fast as we are moving it can take a little bit of time to get that approval to happen.

Those presumably included tweets like this one:

With your help, we will turn our country around and get America back on the path to prosperity. Please vote today http://t.co/uYh0QcDS — Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) November 6, 2012

Meanwhile, Romney’s social media director, Rebecca Heisler, said that the campaign did not tweet during the debate "because it would not make sense given that the candidate was on stage," only realizing later that this "is a huge missed opportunity."

In November 2012, Ars reported on Romney’s disastrous voting analytics tool, Orca.