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. 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,” 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.
– 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.