Romney Offers E-Book for Price of a Tweet
Presidential hopeful will let people "Pay with a Tweet" to get his digital book before tonight's GOP debate.
At tonight’s presidential debate, as Republicans complain that Americans can barely afford to fill their gas tanks, Mitt Romney will offer his new jobs plan book at a rock bottom price: the cost of a tweet. The candidate is making a splash on Amazon and across the web, as his just-published “Believe in America: Mitt Romney’s Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth” e-book rapidly climbs the Kindle Store charts today.
Before tonight’s NBC News/Politico debate, the Romney campaign plans to push out a “Pay with a Tweet” option for downloading the digital book – which is also available for free on Amazon. The tool is a social payment system developed by two R/GA employees that allows people to easily exchange virtual goods for a tweet. It won a Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
The goal for the Romney campaign is to generate social buzz around the former Massachusetts Governor’s e-book, published today in anticipation of tonight’s debate and President Barack Obama’s jobs plan speech scheduled for tomorrow.
While the e-book is available for free download as a PDF document on MittRomney.com/Jobs and on Amazon, the campaign considers the tweet offering to be just another way to get it in front of voters where they are, rather than driving them to visit the campaign site or Amazon. “The premise we’ve always worked on is…you have to have these digital embassies all over the web,” said Zac Moffatt, digital director at Romney for President. “If you send a tweet out we provide you with opportunity to download it right there.”
The tweet-for-download option will be promoted on the campaign’s Facebook page, web site, and – of course – with a tweet from the @MittRomney account, according to Moffatt.
The campaign in the future may run Facebook Sponsored Stories ads to push the book, said Moffatt. The book puts forth several specific proposals to boost the U.S. economy and create jobs, and is currently number 19 on Amazon’s Kindle Best Sellers list after debuting today.
The Romney team has also experimented with short-form video platform Tout recently, which enables 15-second video updates for Twitter and Facebook. Unlike many of the campaign’s heavily-produced videos for YouTube, the Tout videos are quick snippets of raw footage of the candidate elaborating on where he is and what he’s doing – such as opening his Florida campaign headquarters.
The campaign plans to post its fourth brief Tout video featuring a debate walk-through tonight, said Moffatt.
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