ABSTRACT
This chapter places social media within the broader context of media systems in order to detect and analyzes the effect of political messaging that resonated among candidate, media, and citizens in the 2016 US presidential elections. It discusses the intersection of social media intelligence in business branding and political communication to suggest a Campaign Message Flow Model. The chapter analyzes messages created by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, using Twitter as a proxy for campaign statements and focusing on messages that were linked to key issues and personality traits. It tracks the same issues in the traditional mass media, using three national newspapers as proxies for legacy media. The chapter looks at how these messages linked to specific concepts and keywords circulated in social media, again using Twitter. It presents the overall landscape of Twitter content as it related to the candidates, but future studies should look into the construction of that landscape in more detail.
