Social media are a world unto themselves, especially when it comes to politics. Nowhere was that more evident than in the vice presidential debate last night in Danville, Ken. While the traditional media spent an inordinate amount of time discussing who won and who lost, social media yielded some interesting insights about voter interests and passions. I'd call it a triumph of substance over style and new media over traditional media. It serves as a case study for any enterprise examining the power of social networking.
The debate between Vice President Joseph Biden and Rep. Paul Ryan generated 4 million tweets, compared with the presidential debate a week earlier, which produced 10 million tweets. Of the four candidates, Biden received the most tweets -- both positive and negative. Ryan received the least, according to an analysis of tweet volume and voter sentiment.
If social mentions are any indication of voter engagement in this year's presidential election, the Obama campaign is pulling in a lot more interest than the Romney campaign. Starting on Monday and culminating with the debate, Biden was included in 393,472, or 71 percent, of the social mentions, while Ryan was included in 163,355, or 30 percent.
Compare that with the CNN poll in which 48 percent of respondents said Ryan won the debate, versus 44 percent who gave it to Biden. Or the CBS News poll of undecided voters who favored Biden by 50 percent to Ryan's 31 percent, with 19 percent calling it a tie. According to traditional media polls and the political pundits, it was a close horse race.
During the vice presidential debate, women drove the social conversation by generating 55 percent of the tweets. And the topics were serious: There were 72,000 tweets (32 percent of the overall Twitter volume) about the economy. Next came Medicare and entitlements, at 45,000 tweets (20 percent), and Afghanistan, at 25,000 (11 percent). Other trending topics included Libya, Iran, Syria, religion, and abortion. Surprisingly, taxes received only 15,000 tweets, or 7 percent of the social conversation.
The Facebook crowd also trended toward Biden, who received 400,000 mentions during the debate. By the end of the dustup, Biden had 719,000 Facebook mentions, while Ryan had 637,000, according to the Website AllFacebook. More Facebook-related election insights can be found here.
The debate engendered much anger and passion among the social crowd but also lots of humor and sarcasm. The night's top performance was by the TV talk show host Bill Maher, who tweeted: "Hello 911? There's an old man beating a child on my TV." That got a whopping 23,575 retweets.
And now it's on to the next presidential debate next Tuesday night. The always socially savvy Obama campaign has taken out a Twitter ad that pops up whenever you search on #debates, encouraging supporters and fence sitters alike to support Team Obama.
— Karyl Scott is a technology journalist based in San Diego, where she covers the intersection of mobile and social media, big-data, analytics, and business innovation.
Good heavens. First, they go through the cemetaries and round up all their voters, and then they go through the social media sites, and pick up more voters that never existed, except to pad voting rolls. Let's make voter fraud even easier, shall we? Goodness, there's never been a stolen Presidential election, now has there? I know of at least one congressional seat in California that was stolen with the votes of illegals (are you listening, Representative Sanchez? No, of course you're not). All of the jokes about "How many votes do you want, and when do you want them?" really aren't funny. I'm sorry, but if somebody else jumped off a bridge, I certainly wouldn't follow, and I wouldn't favor either online registration or online voting. Evil people are laughing at such ideas, and at those who favor them. Don't be a shill for them, and don't be a patsy, either. You're smarter than that, aren't you?
I think the steraming content provided by the tv networks and cable companies is top down, but not YouTube. Anybody can post a video and anybody can vote or comment on that content. So I'd put YouTube in the social network category too.
I think it would be a good idea to live stream the debate on YouTube as well as the broadcast networks. Look at the Felix Baumgartner skyfall this weekend. The event got 8m viewers - - a YouTube record. As more and more people give up their cable tv and rely on PCs, tablets and the Internet for their entertainment and news, companies will need to go where consumers are.
And yet I keep asking...in a world where Americans are participating nightly on social media...why are all the debates on "Tee Vee" ?
Why not a debate...on Facebook. Why not a debate held in text, the way we regular American hash out issues, like in these comment threads.
It is time to see social media for what it is...not as an "adjunct" to broadcast media, but as its own form. One powerful enough to challenge the Megaphone Model of broadcast media.
So, it would be an Obama post, then a Romney response. Back and forth. But written. Candidates (again, like regular folks) could cut and paste hyperlinks, pictures of their kids, audio bites from Wikipedia (wouldn't want any arrests for copyright violation).
It's like we're all here in the 21st century, but then for 90 minutes, we wax nostaligic, go into our time machine, and head back to 1960 for "televised debate".
"If I had a solution to filter all the tweets in the world into meaningful data, I probably wouldn't share it freely!"
I see! Filtering out what you call "fake or spam tweets" won't be a big deal if folks at twitter.com decide to do so. They just have to put a treshold on the "re-tweets". But they won't do that, because they want people to know that their platform is useful and relevant. That is why I said "number" does matter more than the "content" of the "tweets".
I disagree that total tweet numbers are significant information... obvously those numbers aren't completely irrelevant, but those numbers, by themselves, don't really mean much -- especially when there are so many "fake" twitter users that are simply bots retweeting other people's tweets or algorithmically making stuff up just to fill up the twitterverse with spam and semi-coherent messages.
If I had a solution to filter all the tweets in the world into meaningful data, I probably wouldn't share it freely! :)
I just heard this morning that states that allow voter registration over the internet are seeing a big uptick in registrants. Now, we need to take this further an let people vote over the internet. That will increase voter engagement, IMHO.
I agree Brian that soft metrics like number of tweets aren't very useful in politics or business. Companies have to go deeper on consumer engagement to deliver business results from their social media investment.
And I think the entertainment industry is doing this. TV programs are launching campaigns to engage viewers during and after the broadcast. So are movie studios in conjunction with all the other advertising and marketing activities that make up their campaigns. I'm looking forward to see what the networks and studios duringthe fall rollout of programming.
Writing a few words on social media during a political debate? Millions of people with nothing better to do than multi-task watching television? I'm not convinced the numbers add up to much other than the trend for folks to let their fingers do the talking. I'd rather see people talking directly with one another, but that's another story.
The vast division between the views of the two American political parties surely is not a good thing. There's no meeting in the middle. Seems to me more of a convenient way for adults to bully.
Whether there will be similar upswings in voting this November remains to be seen. Now, it voting could take place over Twitter, then maybe?
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