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

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 ]