• #1042 (no title)
  • About Leoni Designory – www.leonidesignory.com
  • Infographics
  • Social Media – A Overview

leonidesignoryblog

~ socially savvy design

Category Archives: Political

Data analysis, phone apps and social media are rapidly changing political campaigns

14 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Political, PR, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

A city council candidate walks a neighborhood, looking for vote

She taps the icon. In an instant, she knows your name and much more.
Your earnings, education, religion, the groups you belong to, the magazines you buy.
Your party affiliations. Your past emails on political issues. 
Where your kids go to school and which TV shows you watch. What you paid for your home. The last time you met at the coffee shop.

The detailed digital profile makes her conversation easy, even friendly. Taxes for you. Schools next door. Law enforcement down the street.

Some houses can be skipped: no potential votes here, the phone says. That vision or a version of it is popping up in political campaigns across the country.

“It’s a completely different environment,” said Stephanie Sharp, a Johnson County officeholder and consultant who uses and sells a version of the app. “There’s a gold mine of data. … You’re not cold calling when knocking on doors anymore. You know a little bit about your relationship with someone.”

No one is throwing the yard signs away. But the big-data digital revolution rocking media, entertainment, retailing and sports is coming to politics.

The change is arriving at a blistering pace.

“Things are moving very quickly,” said Jared Suhn of Singularis, a political consulting firm. “You shouldn’t be doing one thing anymore. You should be doing 10 things to 10 different groups of people.”

The shift is built around sophisticated and relatively inexpensive hardware and software that now give campaigns rich stores of private and public information — powerful tools for identifying voters and winning elections.

“Ten years ago it was TV and mail and radio,” Suhn said. “Now, you have so much more on-the-ground canvassing going on, strategic grassroots operations, digital stuff online. … There’s a way to get your message out.”

That message is first sharpened by polling and outreach, then reshaped for easy distribution to specific voters.

“You can target people literally to the house,” longtime consultant Jeff Roe said.

Fresh digital technologies emerge in every election cycle, enabling candidates and campaigns to become even more efficient and effective. A campaign’s most important hire is no longer the paid-media guru, it’s the algorithm guy.

Kansas City-based consultant Marcus Leach said combing through digital data allows him to instantly link voters with candidates and campaigns with friends and neighbors.

“It takes only a single ‘like,’ ‘share,’ or mention on Facebook or Twitter,” he said, “and our servers will automatically data mine that person’s Facebook, LinkedIn, look for associations, look for friends.”

The digital revolution in politics is relatively well-known to consultants and campaign managers, but candidates are now catching on too.

“You have to expand your footprint. To a different universe,” said Kelly Kultala, a Democrat now running for the 3rd district House seat in Kansas.

The move to a digitized democracy began to accelerate six years ago when then-candidate Barack Obama successfully used email and a social media presence to reach younger voters and raise money.

His campaign saw the future. Voters who signed up to learn Obama’s vice presidential pick found themselves in an email database, becoming the foundation for his voter contacts for years.

By 2012, Obama’s digital targeting operation blanketed the country, identifying and turning out voters in battleground states like Ohio.

Mitt Romney was far behind.

“Marrying grassroots politics with technology and analytics, they successfully contacted, persuaded and turned out their margin of victory,” the Republican party’s own post-election study found. “There are many lessons to be learned from their efforts.”

Suhn, who works with Republicans, says the party is working hard to fix the problem. “Everybody is catching up,” he said.

That could include state-level Democrats, who’ve often grumbled that Obama’s campaign refused to share its digital secrets. The national party is now considering a major data share, Sharp said.

But the move to digitize voter contacts isn’t driven entirely by partisan politics and isn’t limited to deep data sets and microtargeting.

Even low-visibility, nonpartisan races and issue campaigns can use digital tools. They’re easy, effective — and cheap.

Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are free. So are Instragram, LinkedIn, and whatever other social media site pops up this afternoon.

Websites can be produced and put online for a fraction of the cost of a slick video or 30-second TV commercial.

“You can find your facts, and you can find your Q and A, and you can find your opinion online,” said Pat O’Neill, a Kansas City campaign veteran who advised a winning candidate in the recent mayoral election in Independence.

Indeed, the use of low-cost digital tools, plus big-data and microtargeting techniques, mirror the revolution in big league baseball outlined in the book “Moneyball.” As with the Oakland A’s baseball team, the goal is now to firmly identify voter “bargains” cheaply instead of wasting campaign funds on high-cost, low-efficiency mass media.

“The cost of yard signs has doubled,” Sharp said. “Have you seen the cost of postage? … Every dollar has to stretch farther.”

Big data is even affecting political TV commercials.

“You can actually run one ad to a TV in a home, and in the very next home you run a different ad — based on what their buying habits are like,” Roe said.

 


 

Not everyone thinks the trend is healthy for democracy.

Low-cost, high-impact voter outreach efforts can help underfunded candidates and neutralize the effect of high-dollar donors. That means the digital revolution could help level the political playing field for thousands of candidates and campaigns.

At the same time, though, the proliferation of communications outlets might make it impossible for voters to thoroughly scrutinize political messaging. A candidate can support lower taxes in an ad aimed at one house and more spending in an ad next door.

“It does fly under the radar,” Suhn said. “You can use that for good and for bad.”

Political reporters and ad-check groups are increasingly worried. Fact-checking TV ads and speeches are one thing, but looking at every tweet and Facebook post isn’t practical, let alone examining what a candidate says one voter at a time.

“It’s going to be a challenge for us,” said Eugene Kiely, director ofFactCheck.org. “The strategy is going to remain the same, which is try to crowdsource, get our readers to try to get this material to us.”

A candidate’s opponents will find it harder to respond to statements as well.

“There’s no way to follow it or track it,” Roe said. “It’s hard to do a truth watch on an ad targeted to a select group of people that you never see.”

Digital targeting can also lead to circular political messaging: like-minded activists talking to each other, eliminating the undecided or independent voter from the process and making compromise even more difficult.

“They’re not getting a rounded view anymore,” Sharp said. “They’re only getting the side they want to hear.”

Candidate Kultala sees the same phenomenon.

“The things you like on Facebook or the things that you follow on Twitter are things that you support or agree with,” she said.

 


 

The digital explosion won’t mean an end to negative ads on your television this fall, or blurry postcards in your mailbox. Traditional media will still consume more than half of all campaign budgets this fall, experts predict.

“We must evolve in order to keep up with the younger mindsets,” O’Neill said. “But if you forsake traditional media, you do so at your own peril.”

Indeed, much of the digital revolution is aimed at younger voters, not the entire electorate. Older voters still rely on traditional cues — newspaper and television reporting, commercials and other mass messaging techniques.

Eventually, though, today’s grainy 30-second TV ad may seem quaint.

“For so many years, we’ve just blanketed districts with mail, and hope the name sticks in their head,” Sharp said. “But that doesn’t hit people where they live. You’ve got to target the issues that get them to the polls.”

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2014/04/12/4956530/data-analysis-phone-apps-and-social.html#storylink=cpy

 

Share this:

  • Print
  • Email
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter
  • Facebook

Like this:

Like Loading...

How Social Media Is Changing Politics, From Wendy Davis To Anthony Weiner

14 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Best Practices, Political, PR, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Best Practices, Community Management, LINKEDIN FOR BUSINESS, MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKING, Online Marketing

The Commonwealth Club and The Huffington Post San Francisco present “Commonwealth Club Thought Leaders,” an ongoing series of insights from the most interesting people in the San Francisco Bay Area. Read the summary below and watch the video above–then share your thoughts. You can view the entire interview here.

Access to and utilization of social media has increased tremendously in the past decade, and its influence in our daily lives has also affected politics in our nation. Everything from Obama’s 2008 campaign, which focused heavily on outreach through social media outlets, to the ouster of politicians’ misdeeds thanks to the omniscience of social media, the public now has a new way of participating in the political process.

This new avenue of participation was no more apparent than during one legislative session in Texas in which Wendy Davis, the pink sneaker-wearing policymaker, led a filibuster for 12 hours against a pending vote on abortion clinics. The vote would have effectively shut down most abortion clinics in Texas. Davis, a democrat who was against the legislation, filibustered the old-fashioned way by giving the legislature a 12-hour speech, taking the session past midnight. According to the rules, the session technically ended at midnight and the vote on the new law was thereby void. Despite the filibuster, the vote passed in July 2013.

However, Davis was not alone in the filibuster. Although she was the representative who stood up in front of the legislature, it was her supporters in the chambers and online who made the filibuster a success. A live stream of the legislative session allowed online viewers to see when the session ended and when the vote was cast. And in conjunction with their peers who were physically present in the chambers, the filibuster proved successful. Clay Shirky, a social media theorist and a professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program spoke at The Commonwealth Club of California and explained the idea of digital dualism and how it played a role in Texas’s legislative process. (See the video above)

Shirky points out that this phenomenon is not restricted to the United States but has been present in other political movements, such as the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement and the protests in Turkey. He says that this evolution and immersion of technology into the political process is not by design but rather, a side effect of the tools available to individuals combined with their political interest. Watch Shirky talk about Texas above; you can listen to his entire program here.

Share this:

  • Print
  • Email
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter
  • Facebook

Like this:

Like Loading...

Social Media and Political Engagement

14 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Political

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Best Practices, Community Management, Engagement, LINKEDIN FOR BUSINESS, Politics, Public Opinion, social media tools, Strategy, Trending

The use of social media is becoming a feature of political and civic engagement for many Americans. Some 60% of American adults use either social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter and a new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project finds that 66% of those social media users—or 39% of all American adults—have done at least one of eight civic or political activities with social media.

Overall, there are mixed partisan and ideological patterns among social media users when it comes to using social media like social networking sites and Twitter. The social media users who talk about politics on a regular basis are the most likely to use social media for civic or political purposes. And the social media users who have firmer party and ideological ties—liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans—are, at times, more likely than moderates in both parties to use social media for these purposes.

Some of these activities are more likely to be pursued by younger social media users compared with the social media users who are ages 50 or older. Younger users are more likely to post their own thoughts about issues, post links to political material, encourage others to take political action, belong to a political group on a social networking site, follow elected officials on social media, and like or promote political material others have posted.

Here are the key findings in a recent nationally representative survey:

  • 38% of those who use social networking sites (SNS) or Twitter use those social media to “like” or promote material related to politics or social issues that others have posted. Liberal Democrats who use social media are particularly likely to use the ‘like’ button—52% of them have done so and 42% of conservative Republicans have also done so.
  • 35% of social media users have used the tools to encourage people to vote. Democrats who are social media users are more likely to have used social media to encourage voting—42% have done that compared with 36% of Republican social-media users and 31% of independents.
  • 34% of social media users have used the tools to post their own thoughts or comments on political and social issues. Liberal Democrats who use social media (42%) and conservative Republicans (41%) are especially likely to use social media this way.
  • 33% of social media users have used the tools to repost content related to political or social issues that was originally posted by someone else.  Republican social media users are more likely to do this on social media—39% have used social media to repost content, compared with 34% of social media using Democrats and 31% of independents.
  • 31% of social media users have used the tools to encourage other people to take action on a political or social issue that is important to them. Some 36% of social-media-using Democrats have done this as have 34% of Republicans. This compares to 29% of independents who are social media users.
  • 28% of social media users have used the tools to post links to political stories or articles for others to read. The social media users who are liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans are the most likely to have used social media this way (39% and 34% respectively).
  • 21% of those who use SNS or Twitter belong to a group on a social networking site that is involved in political or social issues, or that is working to advance a cause. There are no major differences by ideology or partisanship when it comes to using social media this way.
  • 20% of social media users have used the tools to follow elected officials and candidates for office.  Some 32% of the conservative Republicans who use social media follow officials on social media and 27% of liberal Democrats who use social media do so.

Share this:

  • Print
  • Email
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter
  • Facebook

Like this:

Like Loading...

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)

Archives

  • December 2015
  • October 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • November 2012
  • August 2012

Categories

  • Advanced Search
  • Best Practices
  • Bing Search Engine
  • Bloging
  • community manager
  • Content Marketing
  • Email Marketing
  • Facebook
  • Flip Key
  • Google Analytics
  • Google SEO
  • Google+
  • Hashtags
  • Hootsuite
  • Instagram
  • LInkedIn
  • Mail Chimp
  • Marketing
  • Merchandising
  • Mobil Web
  • mobile app marketing
  • Mobile Web
  • Multi Channel Marketing
  • Online Marketing
  • Pinterest
  • Political
  • PR
  • Responsive Web
  • Responsive Web Design
  • Social Listening
  • SPAM
  • Trip Advisor
  • tumblr.
  • TV Advertizing
  • Twitter
  • Uncategorized
  • Web Site Design
  • WordPress
  • Yelp
  • YouTube

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in

Blog at WordPress.com.

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
<span>%d</span> bloggers like this: