Could Twitter-Based Donations Change Politics in 2012?

June 19th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

If Barack Obama and Mitt Romney could collect donations directly from Twitter, would that significantly change the 2012 race for the White House?

Chirpify, a Twitter-based commerce platform, is hoping to have a profound impact on this year’s elections. The company, which has previously worked mostly with record labels and non-profits, opened up to the world of politics Tuesday morning.

The platform is simple: It allows users to easily send a donation, buy a product or pay a bill via Twitter. Now, users can donate to political campaigns with Chirpify, too.

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A sample tweet might look like this: “Donate $amount to @BarackObama for Election 2012” or “Donate $amount to @MittRomney for Election 2012.”

If a user has already connected a Chirpify account to their Twitter handle and method of payment, the entire transaction will happen seamlessly in the background. Otherwise, Chirpify will Direct Message the user asking him or her to set up an account. Chirpify takes 5% of each donation as a processing fee, which it says is less than text message-based donation fees.

Should a political campaign be in need of some cash, it can send out a donation request to all of its followers via Chirpify’s Dashboard. For example, @BarackObama might tweet, “Are you in? Reply with ‘donate’ to give $25 via @chirpify.”

It’s Chirpify’s donation request feature that has the most potential to make Twitter a much more powerful money-collecting platform in 2012. Asking followers to donate funds could cause a significant spike in low-amount donations for political campaigns. Additionally, both presidential campaigns have already had success with similar text message-based donation setups.

President Obama’s got a mighty lead in Twitter followers over Republican opponent Mitt Romney (Obama’s got more than 16 million, Romney has a hair over 561,000) and Obama routinely sees more retweets than Romney, so the new tool could serve the president better than his challenger. However, Zac Moffatt, Romney’s director of digital, has previously said that he sees very high engagement rates within his smaller following, so Chirpify could be an equally powerful tool for them.

Essentially, Chirpify aims to monetize the social microphone that already exists on Twitter.

“We believe there’s power in individual donations and that we have a platform that can enable that over social media,” Chirpify CEO and Founder Chris Teso told Mashable. “We now enable politicians to receive donations directly in the stream on Twitter. It’s what we call ‘conversational commerce.'”

Neither the Obama nor the Romney campaigns have signed on to the platform yet — a campaign must sign up for Chirpify to receive any donations sent its way. For now, 25 members of Congress have jumped on board. However, Chirpify launched a special “Tweet a Presidential Candidate” dashboard to entice the Obama and Romney campaigns to get involved, and Teso said it wouldn’t take long for them to see the value in his platform.

“We’ve talked to both campaigns and they haven’t officially signed up yet,” Teso told Mashable, “but we expect after they have a couple thousand dollars waiting for them that they’ll come and claim it.”

Would you donate to a political campaign over Twitter? Why or why not? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, nhauscreative

This story originally published on Mashable here.