$ “You’re never wrong, you’re just early” has been a motto of mine for many years. When I first came up with the idea of measuring PR by doing content analysis, my colleagues in the industry told me, “It’s a good idea but no one will ever pay for it.” That was 3o years ago. While it took me a while to turn a profit, it’s now clear from the size of the social listening and PR measurement marketplace that people clearly are willing to pay for it.
In this political season, every day another social media company is releasing its results of a pseudo-scientific study of who’s winning the campaign in social media. So I thought I’d share a couple stories of the early days of my own political predictions based on social media.
Bill Clinton asks me to meet, and I hand him a report.
Back in 1996 I was sitting at my desk in Portsmouth, NH, when I received what started out as a very odd phone call.
“Am I speaking with Katie Paine?” a young female voice on the phone queried.
“Yes, that would be me,” I replied.
“You are the CEO of the Delahaye Group?” the voice asked.
I assured her that I was.
“You are a woman, correct?” I assured that I was also of that persuasion.
“And you have an SBA loan?”
Again, I answered in the affirmative.
“Would you by any chance have some time next Saturday to meet with President Clinton? We’re having a small business event and he’d very much like to meet you.”
I once again answered in the affirmative.
I didn’t start jumping up and down and screaming until I was sure the phone was safely disconnected. “I’M GOING TO MEET THE PRESIDENT” I informed the entire office at the top of my lungs. “We need to give him a report!”
Which is how my company came to do the first ever study of the impact of the digital media on a political campaign. We had jumped into the social media analysis world the year before and were anxious to show off our expertise. So my amazing staff gathered up thousands of posts that mentioned Bill and Hillary Clinton and analyzed them to determine the tone and nature of the discussion.
I was hoping for some incredibly insightful conclusion about public response to welfare reform. Unfortunately, we determined that most of the Internet discussion revolved around Hillary Clinton’s hairdo and its impact on her husband’s reelection chances.
I proudly handed our report to Bill. He was amused, and passed it off to an aide for “follow up” that never happened. We weren’t wrong, we were just early.
We analyze social media and voting.
Fast forward to 2007, when I was determined to show the connection between social media and voter habits. Once again we gathered data, analyzed it, declared all the polls wrong and predicted an Obama win. And in 2008 we analyzed YouTube to see if that could be used as a reliable predictor.
Well, we didn’t get the NH Primary right — but then again, no one did. But we were right on the importance of social media in getting out the vote and spreading the enthusiasm among younger voters.
At the time I wrote:
The era of counting eyeballs is over thanks to the power of social media to generate engagement as opposed to simple exposure… We suspect, looking at the YouTube and Facebook numbers, that people, particularly young people, are more engaged than in any previous election. Granted, there’s a big difference between 198,749 or 61% of Facebook supporters and 61% of the vote, but if the volunteer turnout is any indication, the difference is a lot smaller than you think.
The old New Hampshire tradition of people talking to their neighbors over coffee to convince them to support a candidate is now happening more and more on email, on Facebook, and in the blogosphere… It used to be that if there was an event at my house, only the 100 people who came would hear the candidate’s remarks. Now I can upload the video and anyone anywhere can hear the responses and share in that intimate experience. In fact, far more people have watched videos of candidates in New Hampshire than live in the Granite State. Kind of defeats the “New Hampshire is too small to count” argument, doesn’t it?
So again, we weren’t wrong, just early. Social media did play a large role in 2008, and an even larger one in 2012.
But it wasn’t social media or even the data it produced that enabled the Obama campaign to more effectively deploy its resources. It was the analysis of that data. And there’s a lesson in that for all professional communicators.
What can we learn from history?
1. Early adoption of social media definitely helps your campaign.
2. Social media isn’t just leveraging media, it is the media. Social media is giving the candidates more exposure and visibility than they ever thought possible. The sheer number of videos is up 9-fold, Rand Paul has produced 22 times as many videos as his father did, and Clinton has already produced 5 times as many videos for this campaign as she did for the last one. And it’s safe to say that more voters are getting their information from YouTube: Total views on all videos produced thus far is up six fold.
Does that tell us anything about the likely outcome? The Sanders folks will tell you it does. He’s crushed Hillary on social media after every debate. And Trump uses social media in a way never seen before to further push his visibility and thus familiarity. On the other hand, in 2008 Ron Paul was crushing it in social media engagement, and I haven’t heard “Hail to the Chief” played once in all his visits to New Hampshire.
3. When you have limited dollars and even more limited time, video is key. It was true in 2008 and it may still be true today. A large part of Marco Rubio’s messages have been conveyed via video. He’s cranked out a stunning 928 videos thus far. The most of any candidate. Even Trump doesn’t come close, with just 161 videos so far. But we’ll have to wait a couple of weeks before we know if that strategy was effective. ∞
