22 Romney Staffers Had to OK Tweets

The fast-paced world of social media wasn't quite so speedy at the Mitt Romney presidential campaign. Sure, tweets may only be 140 characters at most, but they required the approval of 22 different people "towards the end of the campaign," a digital media campaign staffer says in a new study. "Whether it was a tweet, Facebook post, blog post, photo—anything you could imagine—it had to be sent around to everyone," Caitlin Checkett told journalism professor Daniel Kreiss, as Politico reports. The campaign's digital director calls them "the best tweets ever written by 17 people," Vox reports.

At the Obama campaign, things were a little different. Digital head Teddy Goff's four-person team "had significantly more autonomy" to decide what should be posted, the study says. That made it easier to respond right away to events like Clint Eastwood's Republican convention speech. The team aimed to "make sure that no matter what was going on—frankly, whether or not the president did his job—there would be very loud voices talking about how we were doing well," Goff says. (More Mitt Romney stories.)