• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, February 16, 2011

After social media helped Barack Obama win the White House in 2008 and carried Republicans to victory in the 2010 midterm elections, it's clear politicians can no more afford to ignore its transformative potential than marketers, advertisers, and other professionals.

It seems the GOP has also paid attention to the lessons of short-sighted social media marketers who learned (the hard way) that you can't just dabble in social media and walk away -- in short, that there is no such thing as a short-term social media campaign. Towards that end, the GOP is working to sustain the momentum of last year's Tea Party surge with continuing social media initiatives involving online supporters in policy-making, focusing on hot-button issues like the budget.

That's the ethos behind YouCut, a social media platform hosted on the official Web site of House majority leader Eric Cantor. Launched in May 2010, the site explains its mission: "House Republicans have introduced a Continuing Resolution that will reduce spending by at least $100 billion in the next seven months... YouCut is designed to defeat the permissive culture of spending in Congress. We need your help in identifying which program and spending cuts should be featured through this program." Visitors can download the latest version of the continuing resolution passed on February 11, which calls for reducing federal spending by at least $100 billion over the next seven months, and submit their own suggestions for where to cut; other concerned citizens can then vote on these proposed cuts.

As noted, this clever approach to popular participation (sort of Wikipedia meets legislation meets "American Idol") is a continuation of an innovative social media initiative rolled out by the GOP during the 2010 midterm contests, "America Speaking Out," with the stated goal of soliciting ideas from voters for policies to be pursued by the party. Users could suggest policies and vote for policies suggested by others. The "winning" policies formed a fairly general party platform, reminiscent of the 1994 "Contract with America," called the "Pledge to America."

Of course, there are some risks inherent in crowd-sourcing political platforms and policy: for one thing, you might get some weird or unworkable ideas, and then be criticized for ignoring them. Indeed, some of the most popular ideas from America Speaking Out were quietly omitted from the Pledge to America, including the second-most-popular entry in the "jobs creation" category -- a provision which would "Stop the outsourcing of jobs from America to other countries that do not pay taxes into the U.S. and stop the tax breaks that are given to these companies that are outsourcing."