Category Archives: Presidential Race

Is #Julia a debacle for Obama?

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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).

 

Hashtag Hijack: #Forward moving the President Backwards

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I wrote, earlier, about how the attempt to hijack the hash tag #DontDoubleMyRate didn’t really work out too well.  Well, a few days have passed, and now the hashtag du jour is #Forward, and once again conservatives are attempting to take over the tag for their own purposes.

Will they fail like last time? Nope.  This time they’re pulling it off.  In a review of roughly 15,000 posts up to midnight, 4/30/2012 (EDT), the uses of #Forward are:

Roughly two thirds of all tweets using the hash tag are anti-Obama.

Compare this to what happened with #DontDoubleMyRate:

I think we can draw the conclusion that if you come up with a hash tag that personally resonates with your constituency, they’ll tweet their hearts out.  The number of tweets for the #DontDoubleMyRate hash tag is about 4 times larger than for #Forward, and the difference is probably the added supporters of Obama.  I suspect that there’s going to be a consistent pool of conservatives who will jump on (and trash) any hash tag Obama is using, and if the pro-obama tweeple don’t get excited, the hash tag is going to go down in flames.

Methodology:

I retrieved 15,038 tweets using the hashtag #forward prior to 5/1/2012, which was all the tweets using #forward  I could find.  Of those, I randomly examined 375 to determine if the tweet was pro- or anti-obama or just unrelated (a few soccer and basketball forwards in the mix).  That determination is admittedly subjective, but is really only likely to be in question for a small # of tweets (most were abundantly clear that they were anti-obama.  Some required looking at the contents of a URL to determine the intent, and for the 5 or 6 that were that way I just marked them as no being anti-Obama.)The sample size allows me to estimate the percentage of anti-Obama tweets is 68% +/- 5%, with a confidence level of 95%. Statistics FTW!

Obama Gets a Huge Boost from Jimmy Fallon – Week in Review

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On Tuesday night, 4/24/2012. President Barack Obama went on the Jimmy Fallon show, and produced the best ratings in years for Fallon and a big spike in twitter mentions:

Click to Enlarge

We can see the next day Twitter was abuzz.  There’s been criticism of the President from the conservative side of things about the appearance, but it’s clear as a political move it was shrewd.  We’ll see in next week’s analysis whether Saturday’s appearance at the White House Correspondent’s dinner will have the sam effect.

Mitt Romney, on the other hand, got a bit of a boost from his primary victories on Tuesday, but it was no where near what the President saw.  Romney really needs to push harder on Social Media if he’s going to be competitive in the fall.  Fortunately, he has plenty of time to work on it…

Did the Republicans hijack the Hashtag #DontDoubleMyRate ?

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You see a lot of comments on Twitter and elsewhere that the republicans managed to hijack the hash tag #DontDoubleMyRate to use to express opposition to Obama.  Usually, these comments come with a lot of glee that the conservatives have out-smarted the liberals.

So, did the hashtag get hijacked?

In a word, No.

There were 48578 tweets between 2012-04-18 11:04:19 and 2012-04-28 12:49:03 that used the hashtag.  Of those, only 14% or approximately 7,000 contained anti-Obama or just conservative messages.  There were probably as many spam messages!

The conservatives can say, all they want, that they managed to take over #DontDoubleMyRate, but the facts in this case, as Steven Colbert says, have a liberal bias.

Methodology:

A random sample of 376 tweets out of the total 48578 were selected programmatically and then read, by me, to be assessed as being either “conservative” or not. I was generous in my assessment, as some tweets are not terribly articulate.  54 of them were plausibly conservative.  54/376 = 14.36%    Thus, the estimated percentage of “conservative” tweets is 14.4% +/- 3.5% with a 95% confidence level.  At a 99% confidence level, the +/- is 4.6%.