Fact is, social media was a vital, perhaps deciding, factor in the election of Barack Obama the last two cycles. The Mitt Romney and John McCain campaigns were caught flat-footed in the social media sphere and their stabs at it were mostly awkward and ineffective.
The Trump campaign has mostly gotten it right. And yet there are many here clamoring to have Trump's cellphone taken away because they are horrified with the tweets and texts that emanate from it.
It can be argued that Trump's social media emissions (many of them nocturnal) has kept him dominating the news cycles -mostly in a negative way. But then, our media was going to go negative on Trump anyway. If you are going to get bad press, you might as well have some control over it and the ablility to strike back quickly.
Whenever a negative story breaks about Trump, I always go to his Twitter feed to get his side of the story. More often than not, Trump is right there with a rapid response. This is much different then it was with previous nominees - who allowed themselves to get battered by the media day after day.
Now that Steve Bannon is aboard the campaign, I expect the social media interaction with the people to explode over the next 10 weeks - completely circumventing traditional media outlets. In fact, I was thinking that we would have seen it already. Perhaps after Labor Day we get the big social media push.
I remember when Sarah Palin was summarily dismissed for suggesting we needed to get a handle on social media.