"Party Of No" Amplify Their Message With New Social Media Tool

The health care reform debate this current legislative season has been more about who could shout the loudest versus who really had something to say. Earning their label as the "Party of No" the GOP's push back on health care has been perceived as protest-for-protest sake.

Without proposing and alternate plan, a substantive debate has been a challenge to understand, not only for the Democrats but for the whole country. However that might all change with the introduction of a new social media tool called Amplify.com.



Introduced by Majority Leader John Boehner, Amplify.com is an interactive blog-like platform that is being utilized to breakdown the health reform bill section by section, explaining "each piece." According to Kim Hart from her report in The Hill, its written  "in understandable language," and it requests feedback from the public.

Visitors can now go to "The TRUTH about Speaker Pelosi's Health Care Bill," leave their own comments and share the content via Twitter, Facebook and other social media networks.



John Boehner, (apparently the Ashton Kutcher of "political" social media) was one of the first Republicans to AMPLIFY the message to the world via Twitter.



Amplify is in essence a clipping service with a twist. Much of the activity on the social web involves people sharing links to articles and blog posts they want to share with others. But what about when there's a specific part of an article you want to discuss? Sharing a link to the entire article won't do the job. With Amplify, you can clip any section of what you're reading, add as much commentary as you like and then share a link directly to the clip. Amplify syncs with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Friendfeed, and Delicious so you can keep your friends and followers around the web updated with what you're reading and how you're commenting.

So has the GOP found a large enough megaphone to amplify their message to the decimal level they require? Will this new social media tactic be the silver bullet they've been looking for, or will their social media clipping service turn out to just a little more of the same - a lot of reasons for "why not," but with no alternate solutions in site?

Like Shakespeare's Macbeth was fond of saying, a lot "of sound and fury, signifying nothing."  Perhaps. Perhaps not. While the GOP have found a new toy to throw into the mix - coming into the final stretch on this legislation - it might be too little - too late!

kidd millennuim toon