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Does Social Media use indicate political behavior

Does Social Media use indicate political behavior

by | May 1, 2013 | Political Media, Political Research

It is science Friday (Wednesday edition), and I am off on an electronic sabbatical after a very difficult week.   Therefore, I am admitting right now that I am lazy and this may be the laziest post ever written for Science Friday, but that is still no excuse NOT to bring you a study in the field of politics.

I came across this post on twitter, and I thought it was PERFECT for Science Friday.

More Tweets, More Votes

Does social media tell us anything about voting behavior?

The working paper is entitled More Tweets, More Votes:  Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior.

Here is the abstract from the authors:

Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? We answer this question using a random sample of 537,231,508 tweets from August 1 to November 1, 2010 and data from 406 competitive U.S. congressional elections provided by the Federal Election Commission. Our results show that the percentage of Republican-candidate name mentions correlates with the Republican vote margin in the subsequent election. This finding persists even when controlling for incumbency, district partisanship, media coverage of the race, time, and demographic variables such as the district’s racial and gender composition. With over 500 million active users in 2012, Twitter now represents a new frontier for the study of human behavior. This research provides a framework for incorporating this emerging medium into the computational social science toolkit.

DiGrazia, Joseph, McKelvey, Karissa, Bollen, Johan and Rojas, Fabio, More Tweets, More Votes: Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior (February 21, 2013). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2235423 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2235423

[Just because I am lazy, does not mean I won’t cite the paper correctly.]

There is a robust conversation going on with one of the authors here.

 Conclusion

The most interesting thing from the working paper to me is the following:

First, the data do not include any information about the meaning or context of a name mention (e.g., “I love Nancy Pelosi” vs. “Nancy Pelosi should be impeached”). The relative share of attention compared to the opponent is all that is needed.

Meaning, if you are running for office and people aren’t talking about your positioning in relation to the other candidate(s), you have a problem.

Ozean Media: The agency political consultants call when they don’t understand digital

Ozean Media: The agency political consultants call when they don’t understand digital

by | Apr 25, 2013 | Political Consulting, Political Media

It has been an interesting period since Ozean Media released our landmark Twitter study on the twitter usage by Florida’s elected officials.

I say interesting because of the calls we received since the release of the study.

These calls generally fall into two categories:

1)  Politicians who want to improve their social media outreach, but have political consultants who are not or can not help them with the project.When_do_You_Call_In_The_Expert

-or-

2)  Fellow Political Consultants calling under the guise of “Hey man, interesting research….I disagree with….” but then guiding the discussion to ask about improving their clients’ social media outreach.

Frankly, we were expecting calls from the press NOT calls from politicians or other political consultants.

I guess the number one thing we discuss during these calls is that a robust social media outreach is not easy, free, or able to be put in the hands of the intern.   Digital Media needs a spot at the table with its own goals, measurements, budget, and strategy.

On these calls, we talk about the different kinds of digital outreach: video, social, websites, micro-sites  photos, fundraising, email outreach, newsletters and how each one of these should match the politicians branding archetype.  We talk about conceptually how a social media program could be worked into a communications calendar.  We talk about data list building activities.  How these digital communications differ from communication channels they are more comfortable with.  For example, is a messaged photo on facebook the equivalent to digital direct mail?

At some point, in my excitement, I realize I have lost many of them.  They know in their gut they should be doing more digital, but I think they honestly had NO idea that a robust digital program would be so much work or this labor intensive.  I mean one should just be able to snap their fingers and create a web video that “will go viral”, RIGHT?

So in this discussion just about the time when all is lost, Ozean receives “Boy, Ozean really understands this stuff, thanks for the information.  Can I call you in the future?”

It has happened so much in the past months that I am considering re-positioning Ozean Media to:

Ozean Media:  The digital agency other political consultants and politicians call when they don’t understand digital.

What do you think?  Yeah you are right, needs to be shortened up a little.

Ozean Awarded the Oscar of Political Advertising for a second time

Ozean Awarded the Oscar of Political Advertising for a second time

by | Apr 8, 2013 | Ozean Media, Political Media

Ozean Media wins the ‘Oscar of Political Advertising’ for Political Radio Spot

GAINESVILLE, FL – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – On Friday, April 5, 2013 Ozean Media was awarded a 2013 Pollie Award by the American Association of Political Consultants.  The AAPC Pollie Awards recognize the best of the best in political communications for 2012.

The award was announced at the 21st Annual Pollie Awards & Conference held April 3-5 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Washington, DC.

The Pollie Awards are awarded annually to recognize excellence in political advertising, are billed by Esquire Magazine as the “Oscars of Political Consulting”, and the Pollie Awards are generally considered to be the most prestigious awards in the field of political campaign and public affairs industry.

“This Pollie Award is the fourth time in the past two election cycles that Ozean has received national recognition from our political consulting peers, and Ozean is greatly satisfied knowing that our agency is not only competing but winning on a national stage against DC & Tallahassee consultants,” said Alex Patton, owner of Ozean.

The Pollie was awarded for a radio commercial produced in conjunction with Push Button Productions of Orlando, FL for Jeff Siegmeister’s (Rep) victorious campaign for State Attorney for Florida’s third judicial circuit.  Jeff Siegmeister became the first Republican elected to the third judicial circuit since reconstruction.

“When we first drafted the radio spot for Mr. Siegmeister, I got the impression that he thought we were certifiably insane.  To his credit, Mr. Siegmeister placed his faith in Ozean’s political expertise and his trust allowed us to take creative risks that paid off in a victorious campaign,” continued Alex Patton.

“Ozean is not resting on our laurels, we are busy honing our skills to achieve our mission of “navigating to victory” for our clients in the coming election cycles,” concluded Alex Patton.

About Ozean Media

(https://ozeanmedia.com) – Ozean Media is a political consulting & digital media agency specializing in Republican candidates, conservative issue campaigns, and various trade associations.

About the American Association of Political Consultants

(www.theaapc.org/) – Association membership consists of political consultants, media consultants, pollsters, campaign managers, corporate public affairs officers, professors, fund-raisers, lobbyists, congressional staffers and vendors and is open to everyone associated with politics from the local level to the White House.

###

 

To Listen to the Award Winning Ad:

 

Does Social Media use indicate political behavior

Online Comments hurt understanding, but register

by | Apr 5, 2013 | Political Media, Political Research

In a relatively new study released by the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication titled “The ‘Nasty Effect:’ Online Incivility and Risk Perceptions of Emerging Technologies”, an interesting theory emerges.Online no one knows you are a dog

The study measures subjects’ understanding of a science topic after reading online comments posted on the story.

The study has wide ranging possible effects. As noted by others:

Now a study in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication suggests that rude comments on articles can even change the way we interpret the news. – NPR

In other words, just the tone of the comments . . . can significantly alter how audiences think about the technology itself.
Researchers found that even knowledge of science did not seem to mediate the effects of the comments. – JS Online

So basically, as political actors who are attempting to affect public opinion, the comments on a news article are almost, if not MORE important than the article itself.

My guess is this has a relationship to the social norm of highlighting the behavior one would like to see adopted and by making a thought public – no matter how vile the thought is – allows others to think that this thought is ‘normal’ and not out-of-line.

For politicians and campaigns, this study is important and your political efforts must now include rapid response to on-line articles whether newspaper, blogs, online TV stations, etc.

Why? It is science and it matters.

Read the study: “The ‘Nasty Effect:’ Online Incivility and Risk Perceptions of Emerging Technologies”

Social Pressure and Voter Turnout

Social Pressure and Voter Turnout

by | Mar 20, 2013 | Political Research

Every single person is doing it!
A 2008 study published by the American Political Science Association by Alan Gerber, Donald Green & Christopher Larimer lays out a convincing case of how social pressure can lead to increased voter turnout.

We lamented in a previous blog post, how political pundits are talking about voter turnout incorrectly. 

The Science

This study does exactly the type of large scale experiments that the GOP should be doing more of.

This study shows us that by using social norms (rules of conduct that are socially enforced) we can have a greater effect on voter turnout, with some words of caution.

In this experiment, conducted prior to the August 2006 primary election, 180,002 HH were used.  HH were assigned to treatment groups and were sent one mailing 11 days prior to the election.

HH were randomly assigned to the control group or 1 of 4 treatment groups.   Each treatment group had 20,000 HH and 99,999 were in the control group.

Each HH in a treatment group, received one of the four mailings.  The control group received none.

All four treatment groups received the basic message of “DO YOUR CIVIC DUTY – VOTE”

Group 1 “Civic Duty”  Group.  This group is a baseline.  It does little besides emphasizing civic duty.

Group 2 “Hawthorne” Group – Adds to Group 1 a mild form of social pressure.  By adding a “Hawthorne effect” or “You are being studied”.  It limited social pressure by promising researchers would neither contact nor disclose the results.

Group 3 “Self” Group – Adds more social pressure by informing recipients that who votes is public information and listing the recent voting records of each registered voter in the HH.   It also put “VOTED” next to those that voted and a blank spaces to those HH members that had not.

Group 4 “Neighbors” Group – Adds even more social pressure by not only listing the HH voting records, but also the voting records of those living nearby.   Like the “Self” mailer, the “Neighbors” tells the group that researchers are planning on updating the chart after the election.

 

The results

After the election, turnout was measured

Group

Turnout

Diff
Control Group

0.297
Civic Duty Group

0.315

0.018
Hawthorne Group

0.322

0.025
Self Group

0.345

0.048
Neighbors Group

0.378

0.081

 

The Neighbor group had a 8.1% increase in turnout over the control group.

This  is impressive.

As the study states:

It is important to underscore the magnitude of these effects. The 8.1 percentage-point effect is not only bigger than any mail effect gauged by a randomized experiment; it exceeds the effect of live phone calls (Arceneaux, Gerber, and Green 2006; Nickerson 2006b) and rivals the effect of face-to face contact with canvassers conducting get-out-the vote campaigns (Arceneaux 2005; Gerber and Green 2000; Gerber, Green, and Green 2003).

The study does go on to say nicely that the “enforcement of norms is potentially costly” meaning, this technique REALLY pisses voters off.

Also for practitioners to keep in mind, we must ad partisanship into the equation and test; however, it is data worth considering. Read the entire study here.