For a campaign with as strong a reputation as Team Obama has for social media, there’s been some gaffes lately.

You might recall a few weeks ago, we had the #DontDoubleMyRate hash tag.  That worked out OK, with most of the tweets being pro-Obama:

The conservatives tried to (and claimed to) hijack it, but the large number of tweets from college kids in favor of it overwhelmed the opponents.

So far so good.  But only so far…

Then, we have the #forward hashtag.  That didn’t do as well:

Only 25% of the tweets were on this topic.

Now comes the #julia hashtag. My oh my, there was hardly an Obama supporter to be seen:

It’s just not a positive conversation.

Is this a debacle for Obama — is his social media team losing its grip?

No, not really.  The #Julia tag is not an official tag of the campaign.  Rather, it’s a creation of conservatives who want to criticize the Obama campaign.  It’s not surprising that it’s overwhelmingly negative — it’s the invention of negative intentions.

Should pro-Obama supporters have jumped in to hijack the tag for Obama? That’s not for me to say, although I think hashtag pissing contents are at best juvenile.  So I guess I would say who cares…

The one thing this is not, though, is a debacle for Obama.  It’s a bunch of conservatives who like to hear themselves tweet…

Methodology:

I looked at the ~46000 tweets between 4/27 and 5/4 that mentioned #julia.  I took a random sample of 381 of them and scored them as either being conservative, liberal, or who knows.  From that sample, I estimate that 80% +/- 5% of all 46000 tweets were anti-Obama at a 95% confidence level.  (In fact, the confidence is higher because of the strongly anti-Obama response, but I’m too lazy to calculate it at the moment).