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Romney, tweeted by committee

Talk about too many cooks in the kitchen: Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign near the end of the race needed upwards of 22 people to sign off on a social media post before it could go live.

That’s one of the findings in a new paper released Friday by University of North Carolina journalism professor Daniel Kreiss, who studied how both Romney and President Barack Obama used Twitter, Facebook and other online tools to shape their campaign messages.

“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,” Caitlin Checkett, the Romney campaign digital integration director, told Kreiss. “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.”

By contrast, Kreiss writes that Obama digital director Teddy Goff and his team of four social media staffers “had significantly more autonomy” to quickly respond to fast-breaking campaign events. For example, Obama’s campaign quickly responded to Clint Eastwood’s empty chair speech at the Republican National Convention by posting on Twitter a picture of Obama seated in the White House, with the message “This Seat’s Taken.” The post got almost 60,000 retweets, more than 23,800 favorites and was cited in a variety of media reports.

Both the Obama and Romney campaigns also obsessed over their scripted social media attacks and rebuttals in trying to use a bit of psychology on the reporters covering the campaign, Kreiss found.

Prepping for over a month ahead of their first debate, Romney’s campaign did Saturday dry runs and created 200 pre-made info-graphics. Obama’s digital team didn’t do extensive planning ahead of the first debate, but Kreiss writes that the president’s campaign was ready for the second debate by pre-writing hundreds of tweets to go up under handles for Obama, campaign manager Jim Messina or senior strategist David Axelrod.

Goff told Kreiss that the Obama digital team’s job was to “make sure that no matter what was going on, frankly whether or not the president did his job, you know, there would be very loud voices talking about how we were doing well so that if we were doing well that would be perfectly clear to reporters and if we weren’t doing that well they would look at Twitter and see that it was a lot more mixed than they expected and sort of second guess their own perception that maybe the president wasn’t doing that well.”

Goff also said that while the campaign probably didn’t persuade any voters through Twitter, its use of the platform still made a difference by hitting "the somewhat elite core of supporters and then very importantly reached reporters as well.”

"So for Twitter we spent a lot of time thinking about how we could sort of manipulate the sort of national dialogue, the dialogue around politics,” he told the professor.