This is a guest post by Corey Christiansen, Social Media Strategist for global digital marketing agency Metia. More details about him below.

If there is one thing that we’ve seen as a constant throughout the 2012 presidential campaign it is that social media has been the go-to-tool for engaging younger audiences and getting them to influence their friends.

There is a lot for marketers to learn from this campaign about engaging large audiences, managing reputations, and instilling passion. Here are the top five things we learned from studying the 2012 Presidential Campaign:

1. It’s all about engagement

Many of the lessons for brand marketers are the same whether we’re looking at presidential debates or some other event.  In an age where content is king, just having fans and followers isn’t enough. It’s increasingly important to know your audience and their preferred method of communication.

As you can see in the graph below, for this election, younger voters were much more likely to engage with political material on social networks (promoting and reposting political materials and posting thoughts on issues). So in order to increase engagement across social networks, it’s important to post content that resonates with this younger age group.

Bottom line:

In order to earn engagement, brands need to familiarize themselves with their audience and focus on topics of interest to that audience.

2. Passion is key to social media response

Social media data showed a lot of buzz and activity leading up to and during the presidential debates. Social media allows people to share their passions easily, and politics is one of those topics people are very passionate about.  In the case of the debates, users created their own hashtags, memes, and fake Twitter profiles in response to lines from the candidates. These spread like wildfire throughout social media channels.

Bottom line:

Think of ways to tap into the passion of your followers or fans in the social media realm by using a simple catch phrase or hashtag that can be easily shared within social media channels and include those in your ads.

3. Prepare your defense

Engage your audience when appropriate, but anticipate criticism beforehand and be ready to play defense. Brands tend to crawl under a rock as soon as they receive negative remarks on social channels.

This year in particular, both candidates have taken a barrage of negative comments on social media sites. In fact, Pew Research stated in a recent article that of all the platforms they studied, including blogs and mainstream news channels, the tone of conversation was the most negative on Twitter. As you can see in this chart from Pew, negative Twitter conversation about Romney exceeded positive by 42 points in the eight weeks studied. For Obama, negative assertions outnumbered positive by 20 points, though it demonstrated somewhat more fluidity from week to week.

Bottom line:

Be prepared to rally your supporters to defend your brand from critics and trolls when things get ugly.

4. Don’t forget the “human touch”

Scrutinize social media data for measurable insights but stay aware of the limitations. Sentiment analysis of social media data inevitably needs a human filter. No matter how well you train the software, it’s impossible to have 100% accuracy. (And most sentiment analysis tools actually assign a percentage around their estimated accuracy).

Bottom line:

Don’t forget the “human touch.” Read your users’ comments, post responses, and be engaged with the community you are building. This community will return the favor by sharing their passion with others. When it comes to data, remember that the machine can’t do it all. Make sure the sentiment analysis makes sense and adjust the numbers accordingly.

5. Don’t waste time and money by attempting to buy your opponents’ fans

While this may work well for some consumer brands, people searching for a presidential candidate on Facebook likely don’t want an opponent to be the first to pop-up in their search results.

Bottom line:

Just because you can buy search results, doesn’t mean you should. Confusing people into looking at your content is a desperate strategy to gain fans.

Were there other tactics used in this year’s political campaigns that marketers should avoid using? What other lessons can marketers learn from this year’s elections? Drop your comments in the box below!

About the Author
Social media simply doesn’t work if the content isn’t credible and doesn’t build a real relationship between users. Corey creates and implements social media marketing strategies that produce authentic relationships between consumers and brands. His significant experience creating, managing, and measuring online communities for brands including AT&T, Google, Microsoft, Reebok, Revlon, and T-Mobile has built an impressive arsenal of best practices, measurement tools, and success stories. As a social media strategist at Metia, Corey continually engages with clients regarding social business, building social roadmaps for clients, and delivering action-oriented research and recommendations based on real-world data. Corey received his Masters of Communication in Digital Media from the University of Washington.

Source: CNN

Obama: more votes (that count) than Romney

Obama, whose mastery of social media has certainly played a huge role in his victory, tweeted simply this: Four more years.

Four more years. http://t.co/bAJE6Vom

—
Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 07, 2012

That tweet almost instantly became his most retweeted Twitter post ever, getting almost 370,000 retweets as of 9:45 PM Pacific tonight, and another 115,000 favorites.

And — unofficially so far — it looks to be the most retweeted tweet ever. Previously, the most retweeted tweet appears to have belonged to Justin Bieber, whose RIP Avalanna tweet has 223,376 retweets.

We said yesterday that although Americans were going to the polls today, social media had already chosen a winner. More fans: 32 million to Romney’s 12 million on Facebook. More followers: 22 million to Romney’s 1.7 million. And in the end, more votes … at least, electoral college votes.

And, of course, more positive sentiment as tracked by Topsy and Twitter over the course of the last year, despite a few bobbles today. That, with smart social campaigns that harnessed connected Facebook friends to get out the vote, has obviously paid off.

In direct contrast, the Romney campaign has not tweeted for more than six hours.

In addition, Obama’s victory update on Facebook — using the same photo — has 1.25 million likes and 170,000 shares in just over an hour. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess aloud that this is some kind of a record as well.

Regardless of which political party you belong to, that’s fairly impressive grassroots support.

Congratulations, Mr. President.

Image credit: Barack Obama

If you’re American, and you’re on Twitter, you may have noticed that there’s an election on. Twitter users have been seeing an avalanche of political tweets in past weeks as the U.S. election heats up. The recent presidential debate alone generated 10 million tweets, which makes it the most tweeted event ever in U.S politics.

All those tweets — and especially the paid promoted tweets — are translating into increased donations to political campaigns, says Twitter. To track exactly how political tweets influence voters, Twitter commissioned a study from Compete.

Source: Twitter

Frequency drives action

According to the results, Twitter users in general are more politically active than average internet users, being 68 percent more likely to visit Barack Obama’s or Mitt Romney’s campaign donation page.

But Twitter users — I refuse to say tweeps — who follow a political party, or who see political tweets retweeted by someone they follow, are 97 percent more likely than the average Twitter users to surf over to one of the party’s donation pages.

That’s good news for Twitter, which lost no time suggesting that, as Election Day approaches in less than a month, Republican and Democratic campaign managers and boosters buy ads on the social news site:

As Election Day approaches, the most efficient way to increase your campaign’s impressions is by utilizing our suite of promoted products. Contact us at politics@twitter.com to get started.

Another result in the study is that, unsurprisingly, frequency drives behavior. Twitter users who see more political tweets, were more likely to visit donation sites. Promoted tweets, which are seen more and for longer than other tweets due to their enhance visibility in search and on profile pages, could then be very valuable for political campaigns.

The two things the study did not reveal?

First, whether people who visited the donation sites actually contributed, or how much they gave. And second … who people will actually vote for in November.

For that, citizens are actually going to have to vote, not just tweet.

photo credit: Vox Efx via photopin cc

Before you vote, consider how much you actually know about where your candidate really stands on the issues.

On ElectNext, a startup launching at the DEMO conference today, you can take a free survey to discover where you stand on the political spectrum and which candidates are the closest match.

The survey has been refined over time, and approximately 2 million people in all 50 states have taken it.

ElectNext’s founders have firsthand experience on the lack of political engagement, particularly among young people. In 1972, over 50 percent of 18-to 29-year-olds went to the polls. By 2000, the figure had fallen to just 36 percent. In 2008, the Obama campaign energized the youth voter, but even then, fewer than half of 18-to-29-year-olds went to the polls, compared with more than two-thirds of people aged 65 or older, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

ElectNext is tackling a huge problem in a fun and interesting way. Register for free by signing in with Facebook or Twitter (don’t worry — it doesn’t post your political views to your news feed). It asks you to order the issues that matter to you the most, including health care, immigration, and education. It then prompts you how strongly you agree or disagree with controversial statements. At any time, you can peruse comments and discussion threads to get a better handle on the issue.

Ultimately, the goal for the site is to increase access to information and stimulate civic engagement.

Overall ElectNext got rave reviews from onstage experts at DEMO. “I loved it,” said Flite CEO Will Price. “Everyone gets that paper and goes through each initiative and ballot, and this is a great way to frame that.”

Price did caution that he would only consider the application to be ethical if it operated as a non-profit and didn’t sell user data or get data from partisan sources.

Cisco communications executive Sheila Jordan also loved the idea. She said onstage, “I thought it would be an interesting play to make it more mobile.”

Don Dodge, Googler and startup hero, said he’d also like the founders to think about giving users updates on issues between elections, as well. “If it did that, I would love this thing” he said.

Andreessen Horowitz partner Frank Chen wrapped up the reviews calling ElectNext the most compelling presentation of the day.

Keya Dannenbaum, founder of ElectNext.

“Big data is the biggest trend in politics today. Yet all the benefit of that big data is going to industry, not individuals. We’re here to change that,” said Keya Dannenbaum, the company’s founder (pictured, left). ElectNext’s founders have developed a political database and algorithm that can match users with their ideal candidate. 

Dannenbaum has experience working in politics at the national and local levels. She told me that in the three years she worked in campaigns, she observed a drop in levels of political participation and a sharp increase in the salience of the issues in people’s daily lives.

“When you ask people why they check out precisely where the issues matter most, they say it’s because it is just too hard to get good information and participate,” she said. Dannenbaum and her three cofounders want to change that.

Since its founding in 2011, ElectNext has raised $750,000 from Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, Comcast Ventures, and the John S. and James L. Knight foundation. Its founding team is in Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco.

ElectNext is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

If the presidential election that’s due to take place on November 6 was settled on social media, Obama would win in a cakewalk. Especially seeing that the two most common words in presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s posts are “Barack” and “Obama.”

Source: Socialbakers

A word cloud showing Romney’s most-used words in tweets.

It’s a little unfair, perhaps, to compare a sitting president who tweets almost 15 times a day with a challenger who only officially accepted his party’s nomination for candidacy in August of this year. But the campaign has been ongoing for many months now.

Socialbakers, the social media marketing company, compared Obama and Romney’s social results from May 1 to September 19.

And Romney actually does get better engagement on Facebook than Obama, with a 2.58 percent engagement rating on photos, compared to just .55 percent for Obama, and out-engaging Obama by about a seven-to-one margin on uploaded videos.

But the raw numbers show Obama’s massive lead.

On Twitter, the president has almost 20 million followers, and Facebook is even better with 28.7 million fans. Those numbers compare to just 1.1 million who follow Romney on Twitter and 7.1 million Facebook fans for the Republican challenger.

Romney is showing faster growth on a percentage basis than Obama — 58% to 26% on Twitter, and 76% to 9% on Facebook — probably due to both a smaller base number and the fact that only this year has election talk kicked into high gear, pushing Romney more into the spotlight.

Here’s the full Socialbakers infographic:

photo credit: Profound Whatever via photopin cc

The unwritten rule says that you don’t discuss religion or politics with anyone if you hope to remain their friend. But nobody told this to the developers of Party Politics (which just launched on Facebook), a new campaign debate-themed free-to-play puzzle game in which you can declare your position on big issues…while fighting for a high score.

Party Politics comes from the same California-based developer that recently tried to stand up against the “virtual chores” of other Facebook games when it launched AviNation, a history-based airport management sim. According to a release by the studio, it hopes that Party Politics will maintain its history of creating products with “clever, diverse, and socially relevant game themes” by being a “bipartisan game that is fun and intuitive for all levels of players, and gives players a voice to engage their social network.”

Thankfully, Party Politics is about more than bothering your Facebook friends with messages about where you stand on all the hot-button issues. The gameplay itself is like a competitive version of Bejeweled, with you taking turns against an opponent to match colorful balls into groups of three. Of course it’s all cast in a political-debate framework, so the colorful balls actually represent things like the economy, the environment, and foreign policy. The more you collect, the better you do against whomever you’re debating.

It also has special icons, like one that represents campaign funds, that tie into the game’s free-to-play angle. You can spend these campaign funds (and real money) on items like new podiums or backgrounds that grant you specific bonuses during the debates. A giant banner with the words “These colors don’t run” buffs your defense against attacks on your foreign policy platform, while the classic “Hang in there, baby” cat poster protects you against attacks on social issues. It’s all metaphorical interpretations of current affairs, as viewed through a lens of cartoonish satire.

Speaking of cartoonish satire, the game also features dozens of avatars based on modern political figures, with some of the choices skewing slightly less obvious than GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama (though they are also included, of course). If you’ve ever wanted to see Michael Moore or Arianna Huffington take on Chuck Norris or Ted Nugent in a political debate (and who hasn’t?), now you can … sort of.

You can act out your bizarre political fantasies in a few different modes, including a single-player campaign (get it?) and asynchronous multiplayer against a friend or random opponent. It’s a lot like when you post an antagonizing Facebook status about whichever party you think is full of horrible monsters that will ruin this country, but less likely to inspire people to block you from their News Feed. Probably.

Party Politics is playable now on Facebook and is coming soon to iOS, Android, Kongregate, and Kindle Fire. When it does, it will feature Checkpoint’s Boomerang technology, which lets you play across multiple devices.

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It’s all very exciting, I’m sure … checking which potential candidates have the most Wikipedia edits, assuming that their public profile is being cleaned up and groomed by armies of handlers, and making a prediction.

Only available on Android. Get your Google Play on now!

But I’m a little Romney’d out. I mean, just pick someone already. Chris, Condy, Petraeus, Marco. Flip a coin. Toss a dart.

Romney already has his own “Mitt’s VP” app out on iTunes, which performs the singularly un-useful and uninteresting function of informing you who he’s picking for veep about three seconds before the rest of the world.

I mean, this is why we have computers that fit in the palm of your hand and networks that connect us at nearly the speed of light?

It’s more fun than watching Olympics. More electrifying than Usain Bolt. Or at least better than the magnetic stage presence of that masterful public orator, IOC president Jaques Rogge.

Tugs at my heart-strings too. The app informs me that I could be the second one to know … just after the presidential candidate’s wife, Ann. (I think they may have forgotten about the VP candidate him or herself.)

Apple, isn’t there an app review process in Cupertino anymore? Can’t we just swap this out for yet another fart app?

It all reminds me of LeBron James leaving Cleveland.

Staged, managed, built up for maximum effect, milked for every ounce of publicity that can possibly be squeezed out of the utterly mundane process of picking a stooge for possibly the least powerful position in U.S. government.

Guess it worked again.

Source: Apple

Mitt’s who-will-it-be VP app

Image credit: Paul Fleet/ShutterStock