Obama “Declared” Elected! - Measuring Voting Intentions in Social Media
When I watch as-it-happens election coverage, I am always impressed to see the statisticians declare a candidate elected with only a small fraction of the votes counted. With a few polls reporting and, in some cases, 1% of the vote counted, they have enough data to confidently declare the winner elected. Of course, it depends on the vote spread; close races are harder to declare. If a candidate is leading AND their relative share of votes is measured to be increasing or “pulling away” from their opponent, then there is strong trend data to draw statistically valid conclusions.
Based on my super-scientific statistical analysis below (not really), I am declaring Obama elected.
Yes, most polls have been showing Obama in the lead, but there is still a lot of discussion about the race being close. A Washington Post article, posted on Wednesday, discusses Accuracy Of Polls a Question In Itself, and points to an “undercurrent of worry among some polling professionals and acedemics” as a result of the wide variations in results. A TMP Election Central post last night says, “New Polls Show Tight Race In Key Swing States“. A Wired article argues that provisional ballots could decide election this year. CNN questions whether or not the polling results will suffer from the Bradley Effect. Finally, the Washington Times, this morning, states that Sen. John McCain “vaulted up in the latest nation and battelground state polls, closing to within the margin of error nationwide against Sen. Barack Obama…” in this article: McCain reduces Obama Advantage.
Ok, so the polls are always being questioned… but what about the social web? There are currently between 40 and 50 thousand posts, articles, videos, tweets, etc. posted each day about the presidential race or one of the candidates. Can we determine the next president with confidence and declare a winner?
Disclosure: ok, this next section is just for fun. I’m not a statistician or a political analyst.
For fun, I decided to pick a single expression of voting intent and then measure the results and look for trends, if any. I wondered, in all the conversations taking place online, how many people explicitly declared their voting intent by saying “I am voting for Obama” (or Barack Obama) versus “I am voting for McCain” (or John McCain). Yes, there are plenty of additional ways to articulate voting intentions, but I am mostly interested in the % split, than the overall numbers. For interest, I also added the phrase “I am undecided” in the context of a discussion around the political race.
Here is what I found for results in the past 30 days:
This isn’t a poll result. This is a measure of unsolicited expressions of voting intent on the social web (blogs, twitter, etc.). Clearly, this favors Obama with 67.6% of the declarations versus 28.2% for McCain.
So now let’s see if there is a trend and compare these recent (October Results) to those in August and September (see below).
There is a significant change from September to October with Obama’s share increasing by a whopping 13.2% month-over-month and McCain’s share seeing a -10.7% decrease. The trend is also evident from August to September with Obama support increasing 4.1% month-over-month while McCain support declined 2.0%. What is most significant to me is that there is a trend and the rate of change has increased significantly in recent weeks showing that voting intentions for Obama are increasing faster than voting intentions for McCain. It is also interesting to see that relative expressions of “I am undecided” are slowly decrementing which is what we would expect to see as the election date approaches.
Just to be safe, I thought I would check one more thing in the spirit of Net Promoter Score. Companies measure this because promoters or advocates are viewed as valuable influencers for a brand. The score is determine by asking the single question, “How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague?”. Instead of asking this question, however, I wanted to measure how many people ACTUALLY recommended a particular candidate to someone else. So I measured how many people advocated, “You should vote for Obama” (or Barack Obama) versus “You should vote for McCain” (or John McCain). The results were consistent with Obama showing 60.1% share of the promoters versus 39.9% for McCain as shown in the chart below.
Can you shoot holes in my theory? Absolutely. It is unscientific. Still, I am declaring Obama elected. What do you think? Oh, last thing (also for fun)… I thought I would also measure how many other people uttered, “Obama declared elected”. I’m the first!
October 31st, 2008 - Posted in Social Media | | 3 Comments
Master of your (Social) Domain!
Whose domain is social media within the corporation?
There has been a lot of discussion about this in the blogosphere. I previously argued that social media has become a multi-purpose communications medium, like phones are, and that social media is impacting several business functions and departments in the corporation, not just PR. One of the business functions that will be increasingly impacted is customer service/support. Customers are now reaching out with questions, compliments, and complaints using the social web which (to make the point) I called the Social Phone in a previous post, “Answering the Social Phone“. My friend Chris Brogan liked the analogy and articulated it much better than I in his post, “Social Media Tool Are Like Phones” which garnered some interesting conversation in the comments, as most of his posts do.
I was discussing this with my colleague, David Alston, today and he decided to turn on the Flip camera, snag some of the conversation on video, and posted 90 seconds of it. Someone had asked me if I thought that customer service should engage customers on the social web so I shared my thoughts on it plus the special skills & role that I think PR professionals can bring as customer support expands to deal with this new customer conversation channel. Here is the video… what do you think?
October 9th, 2008 - Posted in Social Media | | 1 Comments
Truth, Rumours, Real Science and the Social Graph
Sir Tim Berners-Lee said the internet needs a way to help people separate rumour from real science according to a BBC article published today, “Warning sounded on Web’s future“. The BBC said Sir Berners-Lee, the creator of the web, told them he is worried about the way the web has been used to spread disinformation. He wants to see a new system where websites would carry a label for trustworthiness after they had been proved reliable sources.
I think this certainly opens an interesting conversation. I wonder if he thinks this is a new problem unique to social media or the same old phenomenon that already existed in word of mouth or even mainstream media?
Berners-Lee wants to create a mechanism to separate rumours from real science, but this quickly gets to the question, “what is truth” and “who gets to decide”? In today’s pluralistic, post modern society, which is increasingly reflective of much of the world’s thinking, even science isn’t considered to be objective anymore.
In the modern era, science reined as king and humankind had all eyes on center stage which was featuring the greatest show on earth and it was called “progress”. People believed that science could and would discover the objective truths of our world; we would eventually “figure it all out”. We were confident about reality and believed that the universe was knowable and manageable. Using our rational minds, proven methods of observation (scientific method) and better technology & instruments we could attain the truths needed to improve life and solve the world’s problems. As American philosopher John Dewey put it, “the patient and experimental study of nature, bearing fruit in inventions which control nature and subdue her forces to social use, is the method by which progress is made”.
Well, like it or not, the show is struggling in its final season and the modern mind is no longer so confident. The beliefs of modernity are in radical decline. Although there are still those who think that the dream has just run into a few temporary snags, fewer are willing to believe it.
The post-modern mind, however, believes that reality is mediated by your perspective. Some take it even further concluding that reality is purely a human construct or more particularly a social construct. And so throughout history, the post-modernist would say that it was always some social group’s construct of reality that has been the generally accepted one. The post-modern construct is gaining that position in present times asking, “whose reality” and “why should your version of reality rule the roost?”. The result is that every voice, every perspective is given equal standing and presented to society as a menu of realities. Since the choices are all believed to be constructs, the post-modernist is free to take different truths for a test drive, pick his favorite colour, and change it as often as he likes.
Ok, back to Sir Tim Berners-Lee and his concerns about the social web and his idea about a system of labels of trustworthiness.
If truth today is perceived to be perceptual and not objective (yes, that statement has circular logic), then you can never get to a universal agreement on what constitutes trustworthy or truthful. It will just be perceived as one person or group’s version of trustworthy which has no right to be the dominant view and so it won’t be trusted. Someone might object and say, let’s use the wisdom of the crowd to determine trustworthiness and go with the majority (i.e. crowd-sourced trustworthiness), but then you end up back where you started, because the problem Berners-Lee is trying to solve is stopping bad ideas from spreading rapidly (where many people end up believing something which isn’t “true”) . If you use the crowd, however, to determine what is trustworthy or true, then the rapidly propagating idea, once it spreads, would no longer be considered a bad idea since so many now believe it.
I guess my point is that I think Sir Tim Berners-Lee is in for a really tough challenge in developing & implementing his new system, to put it mildly.
There is another characteristic of social media that I think plays into this conversation: the social graph and trust. People trust certain people; ideas propagate more easily through a network of trusted relationships. Ideas themselves are not just intellectual facts, but have emotional, relational and other considerations which come into play. Particularly in a post-modern culture, people might easily accept an idea because it feels good and they may not care if it is true (after all they believe truth is a construct).
Sir Berners-Lee might successfully build a system with labels of trust, but it won’t work if his goal is to stop “bad” ideas from propagating. Now if he could integrate his idea into the social graph somehow, he might be onto something. However, I think the social graph IS the new system.
Person Tim Berners-Lee
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September 16th, 2008 - Posted in Trust, Influence, Social Media | | 3 Comments
Top 10 Reasons for Monitoring Brands in Social Media
I recommend this article, “Top 10 Reasons for Monitoring Brands in Social Media“. It was written by my colleague, David Alston, as a guest post on Lee Odden’s TopRank Online Marketing Blog.
In the post, he lists the top 10 reasons for reasons for paying attention to what’s being said in social media. I like how David identified several types of engagement opportunities for companies that apply to various business functions within a company (i.e. online complaints -> for customer service, listening for point of need -> sales opportunities, influencer engagement or crisis management -> for PR, brand audit -> for the online marketer, etc.). It makes you realize that social media is not just the domain of a single professional or department; it is a new communications channel much like the telephone or email. It will ultimately be used by multiple functions and professionals within a company.
David’s blog is TweetPR
May 13th, 2008 - Posted in Social Media | | 0 Comments
Online Expressions of the Point of Need
In real life, we don’t go around with a Facebook or Twitter status displayed above our heads. (i.e. What are you doing right now? “Just shopping”, or “I need help finding shoes”).
The powerful thing about online marketing is that people are increasingly expressing needs and opinions online. As an online marketer you can easily listen for specific conversations about your product or brand where people are expressing needs. Then you can engage at the customer’s expressed point of need.
To illustrate my point, here are some examples that I selected randomly of people expressing needs or asking questions in the past 24 hours using twitter (I don’t know any of these people). All of these posts on twitter are opportunities for a company to respond and be helpful. Add to that blogs, videos, images, social networks, micromedia and there are ample opportunities to listen for the point of need.
Customer support opportunities from questions mentioning Techcrunch, AT&T, Canon, coComment, Paypal, United Airlines:
Stevie_Knight: Does anyone know how 2 contact support @ techcrunch.com? I’ve been trying 2 register 4 the forums & haven’t received confirm.
Kichigai: Can anyone tell me if they’re having a problem with AT&T’s data services in South Jersey, or is it just me?
alisonedward11: does anyone know anything about canon warranties?
janelowe: does anyone know if there’s a problem with coComment - it goes weird when I try to submit a comment!
tthomas906: Last night up until 2 am trying to get my website up and running. Having problems with Paypal. I don’t know whats up with them? costing $
leanda: just wrote a list of all the problems we had we United Airlines last week, sending to insurance, UA and Expedia. Will try to avoid flying UA
Sales opportunities for companies such as Adobe, The W Hotel in San Diego, Mazda, Volkswagen, a computer manufacturer like Dell Computer or Apple, a pet store or dog breeder, a bicycle shop, etc.
jbruin: can anyone hook with me up with a discounted rate at the W San Diego? thinking about booking a room for tomorrow
dawrobel: Looking to buy a new computer…
naples: looking to buy adobe professional and other software
scarletdivision: Does anyone know where I can find a Brian Griffin dog? I really want a Brian Griffin dog.
intldiplomat: Does anyone know of businesses in augusta ga that sell refurbished bicycles?
ColinFBarnes: Can anyone point me in the direction for a nice sounding mac podcast mic/mixer setup for around $200?
Peter_BNC: looking to buy a jetta!
JonHenke: I start looking to buy a car (probably an RX8) next weekend. Huzzah! Now, to find a good deal on one.
Meet them at their point of need.
May 6th, 2008 - Posted in The Point Of Need, Online Listening, Social Media | | 3 Comments
The Point of Need and the Three Sales Clerks
I was in Quebec City this weekend where the IIHF World (Hockey) Championship is currently underway. My son was there playing in the IIHF 2008 World Youth Hockey Tournament. While we were there the kids wanted to visit a local sporting goods store.
The experience we had in the store reminded me of the importance of listening and meeting people at their point of need which I wrote about in an earlier post. It re-enforced a bunch of ideas about listening/watching, building rapport and then engaging at the right time and for the right reason. In this experience, three different sales clerks approached us, but only one made a sale.
We walked into the store to look around around. We were just browsing. The first sales clerk approaches us and asks, “May I help you with anything?” The response was expected, “No, we are just looking around.” He leaves us alone.
A few minutes later, we walk into a shoe section and another clerk interrupts us with the same question. I wondered if a better question would have been, “Hi, how are you today? Are you in town for the tournament?” A less transactional question might have at least worked to build rapport and would still have drew out a need if we had one. Our reply was unchanged, “No, we are just looking around.”
Then one of the boys reminds his father that he will need a new pair of soccer cleats this year. They were on sale. Dad seems to be open to the idea so his son starts grabbing a few models off the shelf. Suddenly, we start exhibiting some potential buying behavior as shoes are being taken off the shelves, passed around, examined, replaced, etc.
That is when a third clerk keenly observes the signals that declared a point of need. The boy’s father stands up with the shoe his hand and looks around. Immediately, the sales clerk who had been hovering in the area jumps in to respond and simply says, “Hi there!” He knows there is a need. He reaches out his hand and grabs the shoe as the boy’s father says, “Can we get this in a larger size?”
The clerk returns. The sale is complete. The clerk writes his number on the box to claim the commission then hands his customer the shoes and says, “Thank You”. Smart guy. The first two clerks were interrupting. The third was being helpful. What was the difference?
The third clerk was listening & watching for the point of need and got the timing exactly right.
Do you think the same thing is possible online?
May 4th, 2008 - Posted in The Point Of Need, Online Listening, Social Media | | 4 Comments
Answering the Social Phone
Earlier today, Michael Arrington rang Comcast on the Social Phone. He did this by posting on twitter:
“Hey Comcast, the internet is really slow this morning, can you guys please give me a call?
He knows that Comcast is listening and answers their “Social Phone”
Is Social Media becoming a new customer support channel? Absolutely, it is.
Some companies have already jumped in and others are just beginning to recognize that the social phones are ringing. In time, I believe it will become a standard practice. Remember when customer support via email was first introduced? It was a harder transition that one might think, especially for larger companies.
There are major differences here, however. Adding email to the customer service mix was just another technology or mechanism by which companies could have private conversations with their customers. This is not the case with the Social Phone. These conversations are public, and that changes everything.
It also flips something else upside down: businesses now line up for customers instead of customers lining up for businesses. Rather than asking customers to do the searching, to find the businesses, to initiate contact, to get in line (or call center queues, etc.), it reverses everything and puts the onus on businesses to listen and respond to customers wherever they are. It is quite revolutionary when you think about it.
Companies who choose to jump in early will benefit the most. Right now, this practice is remarkable. It gets noticed and gets talked about. It represents an opportunity to delight customers with remarkable service. Michael Arrington asked Comcast,
“is this kind of customer service really scalable? i wish it was. you could double my bill and I’d be very happy.”
Meet your customers at their point of need.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this. How fast do you think this adoption will happen? What are the major issues that companies are likely to encounter as they wade in?
April 14th, 2008 - Posted in Social Media | | 6 Comments
Un-Marketing
Brian Solis wrote a great post today that every marketer should read. He articulates a very important change that is taking place, “Now, we’re entering an entirely new paradigm for cultivating relationships with customers as well as the people who may one day become customers.” I completely agree.
Please check out the full article, “Will The Real Social Media Expert Please Stand Up?”
In it, Brian describes a change that is taking place from traditional marketing where we speak through relatively impersonal top down messages to one where we have real conversations with people.
He says:
“We’re starting to figure out that we need to humanize our story. We’re realizing that we would never speak to our friends and family through messages, so why should we speak “at” the very people we want to reach and befriend. We’re opening our ears and our minds to acknowledge that we can no longer push our thoughts at people in order to earn resonance; we have to listen, talk, listen, assess, and contribute value.”
And,
“Instead of top down communications and focusing on the influence and control of messages and perception, we’re learning that those influential groups of people are now our peers and therefore require respect, honesty, and support in order for us to earn their trust – and hopefully their business and enthusiasm along the way.”
So how does a marketer go about this? Brian also provides very practical advice including:
“Observe the online communities where your company and brands (or those of your competitors) are actively discussed and figure out how to participate in those conversations as if you were approaching someone in real life whom you greatly respect. Perhaps the most valuable piece of advice I can share is to pay attention to the culture of each community and how people communicate and interact with each other. This will reveal how best to embrace the opportunity and reach out to people though a through a new form of “un” marketing.
And,
“- Start by participating as a person, not as a marketer.
- Talk like a person, not as a sales person or message factory.
- Be helpful and bring value to the conversation.
During this entire process, you’re contributing to the personality and the perception of the brand you represent.”
This advice is right on the bull’s-eye and exactly the type of marketing that I believe in. At what point did we forget that it has always been about people and relationships, about adding value? I’m glad this movement is under way.
April 9th, 2008 - Posted in Online Listening, Influence, Conversation, Social Media | | 1 Comments
It is easy to miss something you are not looking for
I received an article in my inbox today (forwarded from emarketer) which opened with:
“Only 2.6% of US shoppers use blogs when researching purchases, according to a recent JupiterResearch survey cited in a March 2008 Internet Retailer article.
The statistic naturally seems to support the notion that advertising on blogs (or perhaps even blogging about a product) has little impact or marketing value. Immediately, my next thought was:
What percentage (%) of US shoppers uses their television or radio when researching purchases? I don’t need to run the survey, the answer is: 0% of US shoppers use television when researching purchases.
Think about it. Marketers continue to invest billions in television advertising, a medium that is used for entertainment, not for researching purchases. If marketers believe there is sufficient ROI to make these investments, would not a medium or channel that is actually sometimes used for research purchases (by 2.6% of buyers) be considered high quality by comparison?
This single metric also misses the idea of the “topical” proximity of blogs. For example, when I am watching “Prison Break” on television, I am not thinking about cars and do not intend or expect to engage with a car advertisement, but when I am reading Autoblog I am already concentrating on the topic, even though I may not be researching a purchase.
Here is a video which I first saw on Seth’s blog that perfectly illustrates: “It is easy to miss something you are not looking for.”. Of course, blogs are most effective as conversational tools, but they certainly do have marketing value.
March 20th, 2008 - Posted in Social Media | | 0 Comments
The Social Medium is the Message
Marshall McLuhan was a true media philosopher. Born in 1911 in Edmonton, Alberta (Canada), he became a highly regarded communications theorist, scholar/educator and philosopher. The concept of persuasion and influence was of great interest to McLuhan. His most famous publication, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man was written in 1964. From this research and analysis he coined the now famous saying, “the medium is the message”. What did he mean by this?
The slogan summarizes his theory about the influence of communications media on society. His thesis was that a communications medium influences society by the inherent characteristics of the medium rather than the contents of its message. Hence, the medium itself is the message; the medium itself is the greater influencer of society - more than the messages it is carrying.
Now, honestly, when I first decoded his famous slogan, I thought, “that can’t be right”. Surely it is the ideas themselves that change society and not the communications pipe through which they are sent? I mean, did McLuhan really believe that the impact of television on society would have been the same regardless of the type of programming? Yes, he apparently did.
At first, this seems counter-intuitive, but let’s consider an example: e-mail. Did the introduction of e-mail as a communication medium, by its own characteristics, change society (ex: how we work) or was it the specific messages we received? When you really think about it, this particular medium has completely transformed how we work. Try working without a computer (or any email device) for a day and you will be reminded just how much the medium itself has impacted society.
In his Prologue to The Gutenberg Galaxy – McLuhan stated that media are “extensions” of our human senses, bodies and minds. And he believed that each medium produced a different effect on how we view the world.
For instance, he argued that “the technique of suspended judgment” (or suspended disbelief) was brought on by the story telling characteristics of radio, movies and television and that this was a key point of change in the 20th century in terms of how we now look at the world.
Whether you agree with his theories or not, it is certainly interesting to think about the impact of social media, or rather the Social Medium, and all of its new characteristics. In particular, I wonder how the unique conversational characteristics of the Social Medium might be changing our values or views. In what ways do you think the current adoption of the Social Medium is changing our perceptions of the world?
The social medium is the message.
February 27th, 2008 - Posted in Influence, Conversation, Social Media | | 4 Comments
