TRAACKR

Hillary Clinton delivered her best line after winning the New Hampshire primary 6 weeks ago when she declared to a crowd of supporters “I listened to you and in the process I found my own voice”. This may be remembered as Hillary Clinton tragic missed opportunity in her presidential run, when she stated what she ought to do to be successful but failed to deliver: be herself.

Social media offer a wonderful lens to observe the Clinton campaign and where her failures and opportunities crystallize.

Clinton’s performance on social media has the most disappointing among presidential contenders from both parties. Unlike John McCain who has not even attempted to make strives on new media, resulting in a very limited performance, the Clinton campaign did invest time and energy to build her online presence. According to the data gathered on Traackr, her results are nothing short of appalling:

- her popularity on social media is about 1/4^th of Obama’s.

- her buzz, defined by Traackr as the ability to get other people to talk about you, is even more worrisome as she does worse than John McCain by a margin of 1:2 in her ability to start discussions among users on social media, and by a margin of 1:10 with Obama! What does this mean? Simply that her messages fall flat with the online community.

- Perhaps worst news of all for Mrs. Clinton is the fact that negative publicity on the web supersedes messages of support by a margin of almost 2:1, portraying Hillary Clinton as a polarizing figure, generating more hatred than love.

Why such disappointing performance? Here are some of the things that the Clinton campaign did wrong to contribute to such poor showing:

- Demonstration of an absolute lack of understanding of social media, the social rules that govern them, and even some of the most rudimentary aspects, like tagging. Social media have been used by Hillary Clinton as a broadcast channel rather than a means to engage people in the political debate. You don’t need to know much about MySpace, YouTube or Facebook to know that users don’t like getting information shoved down their throat.

- Her messages are overly crafted by communication “experts” and driven by poll results. We wish that Hillary Clinton had “found [her] own voice” but it seems that pollsters have driven the Clinton campaign into a wall by reinventing their candidate with every new debate, poll result, and primary. The result is a candidate that voters have trouble relating to because of a perceived lack of authenticity. This comes especially visible on social media as transparency is a core expectation of the community.

- The campaign failed to see signs of trouble and to change course. Maybe the most unforgiving mistakes of all is the fact that social media gave Mrs. Clinton early signs of these problems she is experiencing now in her campaign and her team failed to act upon the information they at hand to see that an overly manufactured candidate with too many faces would not fly with voters.

What can the Clinton camp do now to change the dynamic of the race?

As much as social media have made visible the main flaws of the Clinton presidential run and they could be the only way left to save her campaign. With time running out, only social media offer Mrs. Clinton an opportunity to act fast and decisively.

Here are the few steps she could take:

- Forget about polls and communication consultants and rebuild her character on genuineness

- Publish material online to corroborate Clinton’s image

- Reach out to influential users and web pundits to relay her message. And yes, it means exposing oneself to critic but if the message rings true, the community will be supportive

- Last but not least, create a SWAT team to work on this online campaign free to run with the ball, with no interference or oversight by any PR or communication firm.

Voters are eager to see Mrs. Clinton shine on this campaign and there is no better place to start than with a group of independent-minded voters right in Barack Obama’s backyard.

Speed is of the essence here and Clinton’s communication specialists and pollsters ought to step aside and let social media savvy experts lead the charge.

We got a great review from Josh Lowensohn at webware.com:

Traackr organizes media from all over the Web

Thank you Josh!

Since we started analyzing the social media performance of US Presidential hopefuls, we have been quite vocal in our criticism of the candidates for their lack of strategy, focus, and even basic understanding of new media.

Now is the time to extend our kudos to the only candidate who “gets it”: Barack Obama. (Well, OK, hindsight is always 20/20). Some may question his ability to deliver on change beyond rhetoric but the Traackr team can attest that when it comes to incorporating new media into a presidential campaign, Obama has probably forever changed the landscape of political campaigns to come.

The Obama camp has a strategy about what they want to achieve and how to use social media and they have shown mastery in its execution.

Barack Obama’s approach from the inception of his campaign has been to reengage in the political process people who have felt left aside and disconnected. Social media has been a core element of this strategy.

The result so far is that Obama dwarfs all other candidates combined with his popularity on social media and the amount of buzz he has managed to create. What we find most impressive in Obama’s performance is not the fact that he beats 4:1 Hillary Clinton for popularity and 10:1 for buzz; what sets the Obama campaign apart is that he has found ways to engage users, get their support, and have them relay his message: the popularity of Obama on social media, when accounting for these users, is yet multiplied threefold.

How did he achieve such astounding results? Here are some principles of success with social media that help understand Obama’s success:

- Be fast – one critical factor of social media is the rapidity of publishing new pertinent content. This often goes against the doctored approach followed by most Presidential candidates (and if we were looking at a broader spectrum, traditional corporations) who are too mindful of what and when they say something. Since the Soprano Finale spoof by Clinton on YouTube, we should all know that carefully scripted content doesn’t always amount to good judgment anyway, so why hold off?

- Be everywhere – one of Obama’s key achievements has been how wide he has spread his visibility: YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, just to mention a few sites. Obama has also managed to be present in many different places on each of those sites, and this mostly thanks to his relays, who publish content outside of the political realm. Maybe the most famous example is the notorious Obama Girl, by barelypolitical on YouTube.

- Let go of control – this may be the hardest thing for political leaders to do but it is essential to getting the support of the social media user community. Obama’s latest “hit” has been a video by Hollywood artists that has now reached over 10 million views and 50,000 comments on YouTube. Maybe the greatest achievement of this video has been the number of users who have modified the original video to add subtitles, made a remix, reinterpreted the song by will.i.am.

- Ease tension between traditional and new media – contrary to most advertising agencies’ misconception, social media campaigns don’t necessarily happen in a media vacuum. As this new form of communication matures, we will see agencies take into account both new and old when setting up a new campaign; something that the Obama camp has already understood as they launched the “yes we can” song campaign on ABC before publishing its content on the Web.

- Be flexible – communicating on YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, or Facebook requires an understanding of the platform and of the rules defined by the community of users in order to be accepted.

Maybe the only negative aspect of Obama’s performance so far has been the surprising lack of focus on the Latino community, which is, as we know, Clinton’s turf. One would expect Obama to leverage his knowledge of the social media toolset and use it to his advantage to reach out to Hispanic voters. Even some of the most basic rules, like offering tags for assets (see our article on this topic) in Spanish as well as English, have been mostly ignored so far. Vamos Obama, solo un pequeño esfuerzo!

How can social media help candidates at this stage in the race and what should be each candidate’s strategy? Over the next few days, the Traackr team will analyze the performance of and discuss strategic options open to each candidate still running, one-at-a-time. We’ll start today with the main winner from Super Tuesday: John McCain.

To say that communicating over social media has not been John McCain’s forte would be an understatement: his popularity on social media amounts to about 1/20th of Obama’s!

At this point, with Mitt Romney out of the race (another under performer on social media), McCain could well secure the nomination without changing course. However, the stakes for him may be a little different and he could have a chance to influence the Democratic race to his advantage by helping Hillary Clinton against Obama.

Why would he do that? The reason is simple: Clinton offers better odds to John McCain for the general election as she is more likely to mobilize the conservative base of the Republicans against her, than Obama would.

Social media actually reflect this antagonistic reaction to Clinton: she is the only presidential contender for whom negative communication on social platforms is higher than messages of support.

Besides, John McCain competes in part with Barack Obama for the same votes among independents and Obama has proven to be more successful gaining support from these voters than McCain, partly by using to his advantage new media platforms. Traackr considers that in the presidential campaign, only Obama and Paul have demonstrated they understand the power of social media and have managed to use its tool set effectively.

Even if we accept that McCain has a vested interest in running against Clinton instead of Obama, how could he influence the outcome of the Democratic race?

As we just mentioned, John McCain and Barack Obama both appeal to independents, but McCain’s message and media presence hasn’t been tailored to younger demographics. If John McCain were to make even limited effort on social media to reach out to this constituency, he could well strip away some of these young votes that Obama heavily relies on to win a very tight race.Such a move by McCain can only play to his advantage. He could well sway the Democratic nomination by targeting the right audience in the right states. Even if he were unsuccessful blocking Obama from the nomination, gaining experience with the new media will be a critical factor for the general election and the Traackr team doesn’t believe that John McCain will be able to win the presidency without making a convincing effort with his social media presence.

To learn more about what Traackr can do for you and your campaigns, visit us at www.traackr.com

Looks like half of YouTube videos get 100 views in first month. At least according to this study.

If you want to know how your video is doing after the first 30 days, and compare yourself to other YouTube content publisher, sign-up for Traackr at www.traackr.com/register.

Using the advanced capabilities of traackr.com we can track hundred of videos and their trend. It is not uncommon to see a surge in views when a video is first published and most videos tend to have less viewers as time goes by. But your daily number of viewer can also increase significantly following certain events. Some of the candidates to the current presidential election race make clever use of tags on their videos and you will see spikes in visitors following a debate on TV or before events like “super Tuesday”.

To learn more about what Traackr can do for you and your campaigns, visit us at www.traackr.com

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