Category Archives: Obama

Twitter Secrets of the Obama Campaign: Introduction

Posted on by

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Remember?

Remember the night of November 4th, 2008, when Senator Obama took stage in Grant Park to give his victory speech?  The massive crowd  that night that cried with joy? The Kennedyesque way the the young family walked out onto the platform?  It all seemed like Camelot had returned.

But do you also remember how unlikely it seemed, a year before, that the winner of that night would have been Barack Obama?  How big the challenge, how high the hurdles he had to overcome to successfully take on the presumptive front runners in the primaries and general election?

If you were an Obama supporter, you were ecstatic that he had run a nearly perfect campaign that narrowly defeated Clinton in the primaries and went on to win the general election.

If you were a McCain supporter, on election night you were left to shake your head in disbelief and relive a combination of campaign mistakes and unfortunate timings that tanked that campaign.  You could only wonder, in the end, what could the GOP campaign have done better and what did Obama do that McCain didn’t?

Very shortly after the election, an answer emerged: Obama’s use of social media had given him a key advantage in the race (see notes). Whether this is really true or not is something political scientists may argue for decades.  But at the time there was a kind of symbiotic hype curve that elevated both social media’s prowess and Obama’s mastery of the media.  So how did Obama come to be such a social media maven?

The path to building his 2008 social media juggernaut may have had its origins in a humble Facebook page the then Senator set up in 2006. It was at that point he met Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook, who helped him get his fan page working.  Shortly thereafter, around January 2007, Hughes quit Facebook to join the Obama campaign.  Hughes brought a critical insight into the Facebook platform and social media in general.  And the campaign did not rely on just Hughes alone: Obama had also hired Joe Rospars, who developed web expertise in Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign and had gone on to co-found Blue States Digital, an early new media agency.

Obama showed his focus on social media with a February 2007 meeting with Marc Andreessen, the inventer of the first popular browser and then & current Facebook board member.  Andreessen is quoted as saying:

It was like a guy in a garage who was thinking of taking on the biggest names in the business … What he was doing shouldn’t have been possible, but we see a lot of that out here and then something clicks.

Something did click for the Obama campaign!

For many people — politicians, business leaders, and the public — the campaign’s victory was a first glimpse at how powerful social media could be.  The Obama team innovated and learned on the fly and showed us, in the end, what could be done with the right tools.

But the 2008 campaign did not teach the Obama team everything there is to know about social media — at least not everything they need to know about social media as it stands today. In 2008, Facebook, MySpace, text messaging, email and a custom web site were the core of the efforts. Back then, Twitter was just barely on the radar: @BarackObama had only about 120,000 followers.

Which brings us to today …

With Obama now having almost 16 million followers on Twitter, Twitter’s importance to the campaign is has grown exponentially to match the follower count; Twitter has moved from barely there to front and center.  And so the Obama campaign is going to have to invent new ways to harness Twitter if it’s going to help Obama win reelection.  If it does, people will point to his use of Twitter as groundbreaking.  If Obama loses, though, his use of Twitter will be a lesson in missed opportunities and an opposition that’s caught up and caught on to social media.

Make no mistake, the Obama campaign knows this and is aiming for groundbreaking by aggressively pursuing all uses of social media in this election cycle, including Twitter. The team this election includes some repeats from 2008 like Joe Rospars, who is back as Chief Digital Strategist, bringing along his Blue States Digital alum Teddy Goff as Digital Director.  Perhaps more importantly, the campaign has built up an extensive new media and technology staff — large enough for any hot Silicon Valley startup.

So far, it’s been working fairly well: Obama has been able to dominate the social conversation.  As I wrote a short while ago, Obama’s engagement in Twitter dwarfs Romney’s, and Obama is generally ahead of Romney on other platforms (for example, on Facebook).  Even if the GOP contender’s lag has been caused by the brutal primary season, Romney has a long way to go to catch up.  True, we’ve seen battles break out over hashtags, kerfuffles over stay-at-home moms, and strange claims about who’s winning on Twitter.  But the raw numbers don’t lie – Obama’s lead over Romney in social media is similar to Obama’s lead over McCain 4 years ago.  That doesn’t bode well for Romney, but his campaign knows that.

What has the Obama campaign done so far to build its lead? What are they doing now to maintain it? What might they do between now and the November election to extend it? These are all fascinating questions, not just for the political ramifications, but for what it teaches us about how social media can be used by other candidates, businesses, or people with any sort of message to get out.

The answers to these questions are not out in the open while the campaign is underway. A few articles have appeared here and there that tease us about aspects of the digital campaign, giving us a glimpse into the campaign’s strategy.  But now that the Obama team has shifted into high gear we can begin to investigate what the campaign is doing on Twitter and identify some of the tools and approaches they are using to win the social media battle.  

In subsequent posts in this series, I will look at the various forms of engagement the Obama campaign is using, explain how it works, and then discuss how others — candidates or businesses — can adopt similar techniques — even without a top notch social media team.

There’s a lot to be learned for both neophytes and experienced pros.  To stay tuned to the story, please follow me on Twitter and subscribe to updates to this website.

Let’s start at Secret #1!  And at any time you can see a list of all posts in this series by visiting the overview.

Notes:

Some interesting articles about 2008:

Mitt Romney’s Twitter Gender Gap

Posted on by

There’s been much discussion lately about which presidential candidate is better for women, favored by women, and likely to win the women’s vote.  And while Twitter is a very unscientific way of estimating that, it is interesting to look at who’s actively supporting the candidates on Twitter.

One easy way to identify supporters is to look at people who retweet the candidate’s message — there’s no purer form of support on Twitter than that.  And when we look at who is retweeting each of the candidates, an interesting statistic emerges:

Mitt Romney's Retweet gender gap -- only 30% of retweeters are women

Barack Obama’s retweeters are evenly split between men and women, while Mitt Romney’s retweeters are 70% male and 30% female.

These numbers are even worse than the look, if this assessment of the overall Twitter community is correct: it says overall population of Twitter is 55% female, which means women are over-represented.  If we compensate for this so that gender mix on Twitter  matches that of the USA,  Romney drops to only getting about 26% of his retweets from women.

It is clear that, when it comes to Twitter, there’s a gender gap for Romney.  It will be interesting to see how this progresses through the campaign season.

Methodology:

I looked at all retweets for each candidate for the period 5/14 through 5/20, and estimated the breakdown of the retweet population by a statistically valid sampling.

There are two factors which come into play in this kind of analysis.  First is the sample size.  I looked at a large enough random sampling of retweets to make an observation with +/- 5% accuracy at a 95% confidence interval.  Second is determination on gender — for a discussion on that topic, see this page.

Who Gets Retweeted More Frequently: Obama or Romney?

Posted on by

I’ve seen a bunch of stories  lately that say that Romney gets more retweets than Obama does.  Actually, that’s not quite true — they say that, on average, each of Romney’s tweets gets retweeted more often than each of Obama’s does.

This is usually said as a means of explaining that, while Romney may have far fewer followers than Obama does (498,759 to Obama’s 15,409,788) Romney’s are far more enthusiastic than Obama’s.

But I wondered if that was true.  So I looked at all tweets each candidate’s official account sent (@MittRomney and @BarackObama) from 4/15 to 5/12 (four weeks), and determined the average retweet count for each:

Click to Enlarge

Obama does get more retweets, on average, for each of his tweets.  But given Obama’s 30-to-1 advantage in followers over Romney, it doesn’t seem like that much of an advantage!

But there is a reason why.  Let’s start with the number of actual tweets each candidate’s account sent during that time period:

Obama sent slightly more than 15 times as many tweets as Romney did.  So each Obama supporter had 15 times as many tweets to choose from to retweet.

When you take that all into consideration, the chart of total number of retweets is very telling:

As you can see, in total, the Obama followers are much more active at retweeting than Romney’s — by a factor of 20 to 1.

As a consolation, though, the average Romney follower is 50% more likely to retweet Romney than the average Obama follower is to retweet Obama:

But that’s pretty slim consolation in given Obama’s commanding lead in followers.

So if Team Romney wants to say their followers are more enthusiastic than Obama’s, that would be true. But it would be reasonable to suppose that if Romney grew his follower count to be in the same ballpark as Obama’s his average follower would be considerably less enthusiastic.  (Why? Because the more enthusiastic followers are likely to be the ones who followed him through the primaries — at least that’s my guess).

But Team Obama can take heart in knowing that their presence on Twitter still dominates Romney’s.

Obama Riding the Twitter Hashtag Waves, or the Half-Life of Hashtags

Posted on by

With the announcement of President Obama’s support for same-sex marriage, the hashtag #MarriageEquality has rocketed on Twitter.  That’s not surprising.

But what is surprising is how short lived these hashtags are.  They’re not wars, meant to last to November.  They’re not battles, defining a key component of the President’s strategy.  They’re just skirmishes — a quick engagement and then a fade out.

Here’s a chart of the four most recent Obama-related hashtags – #DontDoubleMyRate, #Forward, #Julia (that one was created by opponents), and now #MarriageEquality:

Click to enlarge image

As you can see, the pattern is for a big initial spike and then a quick decay until, about a week later, the tag is just noise.

This makes me wonder two things:

  1. Will the President and his team work to keep some hashtags (perhaps #Forward) alive? It will take near daily effort if they do.  They have to work to make the tag relevant over and over again.
  2. Or will we continue to see a sort of hashtag of the week between now and the election? If so, that will take a different kind of effort.  It’s like an endless cycle of week long marketing campaigns.

The one thing the chart shows is that, after a hashtag dies down, if the President’s team doesn’t (re-)launch a new one, someone else will.  Twitter is not a place for long term conversations, and the lesson for everyone is that it takes constant, sustained effort to try to dominate the conversation.

Presidential Campaign: Twitter Week in Review

Posted on by

It’s been an interesting week on Twitter for the presidential candidates.  Mitt Romney is finally the last man standing in the GOP.  Barack Obama has ramped up his campaigning and attacks against Romney. Let’s look at the campaigns’ week on Twitter in review:

Click on Chart to See Full Size

What does it all mean? Let’s walk down the stats…

Barack Obama still has a commanding lead in followers and tweets over Romney — Mitt is going to need to renew his engagement with Social Media if he wants to compete.  He’s been relying on the masses (urged on by the GOP and others) who like to stomp over Obama’s hash tags (see my recent post on how effective that has or has not been).  But that’s all negative — it doesn’t make the case for Romney very effectively.

We can see that last week Romney’s efforts on twitter have been lackadaisical: he barely managed to get out more than a tweet a day.  That’s not engagement, that’s disengagement.  Did he give the social media team the week off?

Obama, on the other hand, is on fire.  He’s averaging over 20 tweets a day, and set off Twitter fireworks on Saturday with 80 tweets.  I wonder if he’ll keep it up.

And the response from the tweeple matches what the candidates have been doing.  Obama gets mentioned nearly 5 times as often as Romney does.  Twitter is an idea amplification device: no signal in equals no signal out.

You might wonder: maybe most of the tweets about Obama are negative? After all, the republicans have made a concerted effort to hijack Obama’s hash tags.  Sadly for the GOP, that’s not happening.  Only 20% of the tweets mentioning the President were critical of him.  On the other hand, Romney negatives are are almost double at 36%.  And those didn’t seem to be driven by an organized democratic campaign.

Of course, Romney and Obama are most frequently mentioned by each other’s followers.  There’s a lot of anti as well as pro out there. Young Jeezy was an interesting blip in mentions, owing to Obama’s prediction of his future singing…

So if last week wasn’t so good for Mitt, will he step up his Twitter output this week? Will the GOP increase its hashtag hijacking to grow Obama’s negatives? We’ll see in a week!  Be sure to subscribe to updates from this website — we only send out notification of new postings, so there’s no spamming to worry about.

Methodology:

Want to know how I came up with this data?

  • Tweets by candidates look only at the @BarackObama and @MittRomeny accounts.
  • Mentions look for tweets containing one or more of @BarackObama, #Obama2012, @MittRomney, or #Romney2012
  • Sentiment was calculated by taking a random sample of all tweets during the week mentioning either candidate.  Each tweet was scored, after I read it, as being in opposition of the candidate (anti-), not in opposition of the candidate (pro-), or not really about the candidate (off-topic) The sample size was 383 for Romney and 384 for Obama, and the percentages reported are + or – 5% at a 95% confidence level.  There is a level of subjectivity in my scoring, but for most tweets it’s pretty darn clear.
  • The list of top mentions is fairly simple to calculate.

Tools used were custom Java analysis programs, MySQL database.  Charts were generated in Excel and the entire document was assembled in Photoshop Elements 10. All on a Mac.

Sorry you read this far 🙂 ?