Did social media and content marketing kill the 20th Century Campaign Mechanism?
“Not one vote, not one dollar will be generated online that I could not get with a solid GOTV and fundraising team.”
- a sign on the wall in the Kerry for President Campaign HQ, 2004“You know, I don’t need some tech guy telling me I have to put a website URL on an ad. I’ve been doing this for years!”
- quote from a campaign media consultant for a US Senate campaign, 2004
Years ago, Nick Thompson of The New Yorker fame asked me if social networks were going to influence the outcome of Presidential Elections. I wrote a piece back then that suggested there were some ingredients that were missing:
“But I make one caveat — the only way social networks will have some REAL impact will be if campaigns dedicate the energy/resources to make them effective OR to let their supporters within these networks have REAL control over the messages in a fashion as described as virtual precinct captains.”
Erin Pettigrew, formerly of Gawker Media, wrote an excellent analysis of the Facebook sentiment of the election and how using Facebook, one could determine the likely outcome of the election (excerpt below):
Facebook interest data signaled this election’s potential upset (likely for months) but polls didn’t notice.
Data from Facebook conversations captured a truer picture of nationwide sentiment and support than polling data could capture. The lack of visibility into this overwhelming base led to narrowing Hillary’s apparent margin of victory in blue states, upsetting it in swing states (Facebook data predicted both Pennsylvania and Michigan), and shoring up Trump’s margin in red states.
One thing I will be interested in — how much did each candidate spend on:
- Social Media Advertising (generating likes) on Facebook and twitter — likely to be hidden behind a marketing organization’s expenditure which give the page owner or the account owner the OAuth tokens for data collection
- Content Creation and Marketing (making content that could be viral) — who did this work? “I was hearing from someone” that Trump was having people offshore create the content and spreading it online
- Psychographic Analysis Consulting — not focus group work, but psychographic messaging or persuasion — back in my “influencer marketing” days, learning the sentiment and the key word messaging though reading tweets and other social media commentary by having someone Like your Facebook page is VERY powerful.
In 2011, a friend asked me to join his company (PeerIndex) to apply the techniques I had garnered in the Kerry Campaign and apply it to Big Data and sentiment analysis for the help of marketing campaigns.
One thing I remember is that if you get the OAuth tokens from Facebook and/or twitter, you get the streams of consciousness and feeds of the people who support you — for FREE.
Given another urban legend that Trump started his campaign by listening to the messaging of right wing radio and other more alt-right messaging, this technique could easily bring about the tuning of the powerful persuasion messaging that overcame the media onslaught that Hillary and others poured on him.
When the numbers come out, I will definitely check.
