Talk about too many cooks in the kitchen: Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign near the end of the race needed upwards of 22 people to sign off on a social media post before it could go live. 
 
 That’s one of the findings in a new paper released Friday by University of North Carolina journalism professor Daniel Kreiss, who studied how both Romney and President Barack Obama used Twitter, Facebook and other online tools to shape their campaign messages. 
 
 “So whether it was a tweet, Facebook post, blog post, photo—anything you could imagine—it had to be sent around to everyone for approval. Towards the end of the campaign that was 22 individuals who had to approve it,” Caitlin Checkett, the Romney campaign digital integration director, told Kreiss. “The digital team unfortunately did not have the opportunity to think of things on their own and post them. ... The downfall of that of course is as fast as we are moving it can take a little bit of time to get that approval to happen.” 
 
 By contrast, Kreiss writes that Obama digital director Teddy Goff and his team of four social media staffers “had significantly more autonomy” to quickly respond to fast-breaking campaign events. For example, Obama’s campaign quickly responded to Clint Eastwood’s empty chair speech at the Republican National Convention by posting on Twitter a picture of Obama seated in the White House, with the message “This Seat’s Taken.” The post got almost 60,000 retweets, more than 23,800 favorites and was cited in a variety of media reports. 
 
 Both the Obama and Romney campaigns also obsessed over their scripted social media attacks and rebuttals in trying to use a bit of psychology on the reporters covering the campaign, Kreiss found. 
 
 Prepping for over a month ahead of their first debate, Romney’s campaign did Saturday dry runs and created 200 pre-made info-graphics. Obama’s digital team didn’t do extensive planning ahead of the first debate, but Kreiss writes that the president’s campaign was ready for the second debate by pre-writing hundreds of tweets to go up under handles for Obama, campaign manager Jim Messina or senior strategist David Axelrod. 
 
 Goff told Kreiss that the Obama digital team’s job was to “make sure that no matter what was going on, frankly whether or not the president did his job, you know, there would be very loud voices talking about how we were doing well so that if we were doing well that would be perfectly clear to reporters and if we weren’t doing that well they would look at Twitter and see that it was a lot more mixed than they expected and sort of second guess their own perception that maybe the president wasn’t doing that well.” 
 
 Goff also said that while the campaign probably didn’t persuade any voters through Twitter, its use of the platform still made a difference by hitting "the somewhat elite core of supporters and then very importantly reached reporters as well.” 
 
 "So for Twitter we spent a lot of time thinking about how we could sort of manipulate the sort of national dialogue, the dialogue around politics,” he told the professor. 
 
 Read more about: Mitt Romney ||||| When Mitt Romney's digital team wanted to send out a tweet during the 2012 campaign, it wasn't easy for them. A new paper by Daniel Kreiss, an assistant professor at UNC Chapel Hill (and flagged by Brendan Nyhan on Twitter), finds that, late in the campaign, as many as 22 people had to sign off on the language of each tweet from the @MittRomney feed. That's according to Romney's digital integration director Caitlin Checkett, who said: 
 
 CHECKETT: "So whether it was a tweet, Facebook post, blog post, photo — anything you could imagine — it had to be sent around to everyone for approval. Towards the end of the campaign that was 22 individuals who had to approve it. ... The digital team unfortunately did not have the opportunity to think of things on their own and post them." 
 
 Romney's digital director Zac Moffatt concurred, telling Kreiss the campaign had "the best tweets ever written by 17 people ... It was the best they all could agree on every single time." 
 
 In contrast, Kreiss finds that Obama's digital team had "more autonomy," which made it easier for staffers "to respond to political events in the moment and in a communicative style that accords with the norms and expectations of networked publics on Twitter." He cites a humorous tweet from the @BarackObama feed responding to Clint Eastwood's "empty chair" Republican convention speech earlier that night. 
 
 Politicians and their staffers are generally very cautious with official tweets, and that's understandable. There's little upside from most campaign tweets, and potentially a lot of downside from a Twitter blunder dominating the headlines. Still, having 17 to 22 people vet each tweet seems like a bit of an overcorrection, and makes one wonder what Romney's management style would have been like in the White House.
– 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.