November 4th, 2008
It’s Election Day, and some pundits are predicting a landslide win for Obama, while others say that McCain has a slim but very real path to victory. In other words, no one knows anything for sure.
We decided to apply the same methodology we previously used to predict individual primaries, to gauge social media’s feelings on the two candidates. I won’t call these results a prediction– because there are too many variables this time around– but it gives a clear picture of who’s winning in the blogosphere.
We first looked at CI’s home state of Colorado, for the 7 days leading up to Election Day (10/28-11/3). We measured and averaged the mentions of each candidate, along with the sentiment, within a sample set of 30 right-leaning and 30 left-leaning Colorado-based blogs. When we translated these numbers into percentages (see methodology), Obama emerged the clear winner– 55% to 45%.
We also performed a national pulse-check, where we used the same metrics (avg. sentiment multiplied by number of mentions) and timeframe, but did not take party affiliation or location into account. This produced almost exactly the same result– Obama with 55%, McCain with 45.
Both metrics have their weaknesses. The Colorado sample set is very small; and on a national scale, Obama has been dominant in the social media space for over a year now. But the fact that both produced a ~10% point advantage for Obama, using separate sample sets, is definitely interesting.
Will this translate to the polls? We’ll see tonight (hopefully).
An observation of candidate’s approaches to social media during the primaries: Both Hilary and Obama had official twitter feeds populated with campaign information, and although both had many followers at the time, but Hillary followed no one, and Obama had a bot (or an intern) that followed each of his followers back.
Obviously, Obama wasn’t personally watching each tweet, sending them drectly to his cell phone. It may have allowed the Obama team to pull anayltics from his social media supporters. But I think it’s just evidence of that Obama’s team understood social media much better than Hilary’s that they were able to realize the simple value of a ‘follow back’.