The election was supposed to be close. Regardless of your party affiliation, you heard that for months: Maybe an electoral tie. Certainly with one candidate winning the electoral college and the other the popular vote. We wouldn’t know for days after November 6th…

Oops. The slide presentation/mini e-book below explains what I think happened: Polling companies missed an entire demographic group. At the same time: If the GOP wants to get back in the fight in 2016, they need to take a serious look at their social media strategy. That could hold the key to cracking their universe problem.

Disclaimer: I am a pinko lefty liberal. But that didn’t affect my research. You can see how hard I’ve been on the Democrats in past years for their social and internet marketing gaffes: Here, here and here. And either side can use or ignore this info.

Most important: Whichever party you’re from, please don’t post political yelling, screaming, taunting or caterwauling below. I’ll delete it. Stick to the report, and what you’d add, change or delete.

The post The social candidacy: The elections Facebook influenced appeared first on Portent.

This year’s presidential race continues to be a great marketing study: The niche brand with a universe problem versus the hesitant big brand. After the debate last week, both candidates had a huge burst of support on Facebook. Both President Obama and Governor Romney’s Facebook fan growth rate grew by 2x or more.

After that the data gets preeeetttty interesting:

Did the Obama campaign spam Facebook?

Someone check my numbers here, because I’d swear the Facebook data shows the Obama campaign adding 1.2 million fans on Facebook in a single day (10/8/12):

The Obama campaign added 1.2 million Facebook fans in one day.

I looked everywhere for an explanation, but couldn’t find any.

That naturally got me thinking “Spam.” Either a member of the Obama Campaign did a happy dance on Amazon Mechanical Turk and bought a ridiculous quantity of followers all at once, or an Obama opponent decided to see if she could blast his Facebook profile into being locked down. Dunno.

Looking at shares/fan, though, we didn’t find a huge drop. You’d expect 1.2 million new, worthless followers would pull down the average shares per follower. Not so here:

Barack Obama’s shares per fan didn’t fall, in spite of adding 1.2 million fans in a single day.

Sooo, either someone tried to spam and accidentally acquired a slew of fantastic, interested fans, or something huge happened 10/8/12 that I completely missed. Anyone?

The polling gap closes

Mitt Romney saw a huge rise in Facebook fan growth rate, too, but he saw it immediately following the debate:

Mitt Romney saw immediate improvement in his Facebook growth rate after the 10/3 debate.

That corresponds to his sudden rise in the polls.

What’s it all mean? His debate performance cracked the shell on his universe problem. He got in front of a lot more people, and appealed to them. The result was both Facebook growth and a rise in the polls.

Note: I’m not saying one caused the other. Just that they correspond. The interesting part of the data, to me, is how intertwined Facebook and polling data is this year.

What’s next

The Obama campaign saw their huge growth on 10/8. That corresponds to a fall in Governor Romney’s growth rate:

When Barack Obama had his huge surge in audience growth, Mitt Romney’s growth rate fell.

We’re still testing this theory, and it’s hard to tell if the one-day, 1.2 million fan surge is an anomaly or not. The model we’re building suggests another Obama surge in the polls is coming, but we’ll see. Some polls show Romney in the lead at this point. Others show Obama in the lead and pulling away again. Others indicate an increased chance that Elvis may enter the race. More on that as the data emerges.

Niche brand versus big brand

In our first report, we pointed out that the Romney campaign has a universe problem, while the Obama campaign faces the listlessness and inertia of any big brand. The first debate reinforced that. For whatever reason, the President looked, well, listless. He was extremely restrained, rarely responding to jabs from Governor Romney. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, came out on the attack, pushing hard to make his views known. That seems to have expanded his universe, as polling numbers quickly tilted in his favor:

That’s the danger of a conservative communications strategy, whether you’re a presidential candidate or a corporation. The Obama campaign has left the door open for Mitt Romney. Governor Romney’s breakout performance at the last debate moved him into a virtual tie with the President.

In social media and traditional media, this race is shaping up to be a contest between a contender with a small audience who needs a larger one, and an incumbent with a huge fan base that he can’t keep inspired: The niche brand that’s trying to break out, and the major brand that needs a wakeup call.

Debates are notorious for short-term bounce and long-term irrelevance. Will it stick? We’ll see. But the lesson for the Obama camp—and marketers— is pretty clear: If you play not to lose, you’ll probably do just that.

Tomorrow, I’ll analyze what the candidates said over the past week and audience response to their messages/styles.

The post Facebook political update: Debates, spam and a polling slam appeared first on Portent.

You can’t even tell that, as the camera came on, I was whispering “don’t say um or like don’t say um or like don’t say um or like.”

You can see our report on the topic in this blog post.

And a huge shoutout to KOMO for giving us the video!!!

The post Social media politics: Portent goes primetime on KOMO 4 News appeared first on Portent.

Update: You can watch the video of my interview, now, in this blog post.

My KOMO TV appearance 10/3 was a bit of surprise, and our research wasn’t written up as prettily as I’d like. Still, I figured some folks might want to see more information than I can communicate in a 3-minute TV segment. Here’s the report so far:

I will be updating it over the next few weeks. Subscribe if you’d like the latest!

The post Social media and the presidential election: Our report appeared first on Portent.

Images from Wikipedia (minus the speech bubbles)

I’m going to be on KOMO 4 News Primetime tonight, speaking in a 3-minute segment about social media’s growth and influence in this year’s Presidential race. We’ve been researching Facebook/Twitter interactions and the election for about 5 months—I’ll be talking about our findings so far.

The highlights:

• This is the first Presidential election where social media reflects and affects the outcome for both sides.
• The Romney campaign suffers from a ‘universe problem’ as reflected in their Facebook data: Romney has a highly motivated core audience but can’t expand beyond it. That’s a symptom of the problems that have him losing ground in battleground states like Colorado.
• The Obama campaign suffers from big-brand problems: He has a Facebook audience larger than the population of Texas (!!!!) and therefore is very cautious about what he says/does there. But that makes it hard for him to put the election away, at least on Facebook.
• This is marketing – each candidate has a brand. Each campaign is trying to strengthen their brand and get you to vote for them. Social media’s a part of that now.

The show airs (live) at 9 PM. You can watch it here.

I’ll be posting more of the research and data this evening and tomorrow.

I’d be lying if I said I was totally relaxed and felt like I was born to be on TV (cough). But I’ll rely on the great folks at KOMO to help me out.

[ Ian Lurie on KOMO 4 News Primetime, 9 PM (approximately) 10/3/2012 ]

The post I’m on KOMO 4 News Primetime appeared first on Portent.