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.

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

Authors: Laurent Liscia & Pierre-Loic Assayag

Marketing nirvana is a special place that violates the first law of thermodynamics: if you’ve found it, you can generate maximum buzz with very little energy and expenditure. You’d think, then, that campaign managers, hostage as they are to enormous stakes and insufficient donations, would tirelessly seek out that nirvana by adopting bold, innovative communication strategies – and yet, tried and true, or even “stale” appears to be the motto on the publicity trail.

Nearly four years ago, George’s Bush’s campaign was led to success by a direct marketing wonk: Karl Rove, who made his fortune using techniques developed decades ago. Granted, Dubya was an incumbent, and given the opposition, might’ve won with no message at all.

This year, all presidential hopefuls look like they’ve understood the value of the Internet: they have websites, newsletters, email campaigns, even blogs, MySpace accounts and YouTube videos. However, when you take a closer look, you realize that very few of their teams know how to leverage the viral nature of social media, and operating from recipes that stopped working years ago.

What we did at Traackr.com, which measures the popularity, reach and buzz of any given digital asset or campaign, was to create Traackr accounts for every candidate and track assets (such as videos) posted to a variety of sites.

One of the things we discovered, beyond the fact that there are huge differences in social media proficiency from one campaign to the next, and not always where you expect them to be, was no presidential contender whatsoever knows how to tag their assets.

Let’s step back and think about tagging for a second. Tagging is the well-known process by which you can associate relevant keywords to any document: a photo, a video, a song, or a PDF for instance. Librarians invented this methodology more than a century ago to make sure visitors would find books that were pertinent to their research topics. That’s what “relevant” means, right?

Except relevance has taken on new dimensions in the search space. If you have an asset online and you have your ear to the Web pulse, you might decide to tag your assets with keywords that resonate with the current buzz. This is not like tagging everything you post with the keyword “sex”; tagging is not about false advertising. It’s about presenting your assets in ways that visitors can relate to. For instance, if your video is about jobs being outsourced to India, you shouldn’t tag it “Mitt Romney” and leave it at that.

Guess what: that’s exactly what campaigners for McCain, Romney and everyone else are doing. If they tag their candidates’ assets at all, they usually use their name and their direct rival’s. Not unlike Motel 6 bidding on the Super 8 keywords on Google.

The problem with that Karl Rovian strategy is that users aren’t looking for the cheapest possible presidential candidate – they’re looking for content. “What did Hillary say about jobs outsourcing? Maybe there’s a video or podcast that will tell me that. “
The current, crude approach to tagging drastically limits the number and type of viewers who see the content painstakingly posted by campaign staffers.

A savvier tagging strategy based on true relevance and buzz could help candidates:
- Reach the users they need to talk to the most, such as independents and undecided voters
- Help these users browse their way to a richer message and get answers to their most burning questions
- Respond to smear campaigns in a constructive way

Presidential hopefuls are in dire need of expertise in developing a tagging strategy. Time’s running out and we’re not seeing anyone rise to the challenge.

[PS: Here's the kicker: we realized after a few weeks that we had not tagged this article properly! We need a dose of our own medicine, clearly.]

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

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By Pierre-Loic Assayag and Laurent Liscia (Traackr.com)

Summary

The concept of electronic town hall has been kicking around since Ross Perot coined the term. The data we’ve been collecting on Traackr (a social media campaign tracking site) suggests that social media such as YouTube and MySpace are turning it into a reality. While successful campaigns online, like their “real-world” counterparts, still hinge on crafting the right message, they also require that the candidate address the audience without artifice: in the current primaries, for instance, citizens online have a preference for grassroots campaigns that convey authenticity and a theme of change.

1. Not all campaigns know how to use social media

One of the key measure of influence in Traackr is “buzz”, defined as the ability to initiate a topic and make others discuss it. Obama and Ron Paul both show a much higher buzz score than their opponents. How do they do that?

Most candidates operate on a fundamental misconception of participatory media: they think of them as an extension of their TV ads – only free. Not so. Users on YouTube, for instance, tend to perceive a candidate’s views through the lens of other YouTube users’ comments. They rely on the community to qualify the candidate’s statements, and form their own opinion only after they’ve read several comments. (To our knowledge, there is no reliable study at this point of how users read the comments page).

In that sense, using YouTube as a broadcasting platform prompts viewers to ignore you at best and despise you more often than not. Instead, encouraging viewers to relay your message by making it their own generates tremendous buzz: this is where Barack Obama and Ron Paul have done so well and where others have failed to date.

2. Social media can stimulate new voter participation

The unexpected good results for Barack Obama and Ron Paul in Iowa and NH can largely be chalked up to their success in bringing new voters to the ballot.

We would argue that participatory media have played a pivotal role in this process. They have given a voice to many citizens who have traditionally felt isolated, powerless or disenfranchised. There are two immediate consequences to this: first, it should come as no surprise that this audience is particularly sensitive to the theme of change, since their “political apathy” stems from their feeling that they have no power to change the way things work; second, this audience expects authenticity openness, and availability from their candidates.

If you can’t deliver – stay out! That said, with new media increasingly focusing on the campaign process, presidential hopefuls have no choice anyway.

3. Social media add speed and authenticity to the marketing mix

Why is it so hard for candidates to engage voters on new social media? For the same reason that metrics tools like Traackr have emerged: traditional “one to many” marketing, which made the fortune of the likes of Karl Rove, is on its way out.

In case you’re skeptical, think about the rate of change on the Internet: the last presidential election was in 2004. In four years, E-commerce has become a significant chunk of the economy, and Google has risen to prominence as the engine of E-commerce. Now, buyers seek out products – they don’t wait for fliers and catalogs to come into their physical mailbox.

No need for a crystal ball to predict that this trend will continue. Let’s apply this knowledge to the primaries: most campaign managers work hard to create a candidate’s image based on a consistent set of values and corresponding sound bites that can be repeated at every opportunity.

On social media the traditional rules of marketing are modified – while image still matters, speed of communication matters even more, as well as a willingness to engage users in debate, even if they disagree with a candidate’s ideas. That’s the “town hall” piece in “electronic town hall”. As uncomfortable as virtual debates might be, candidates should jump on this opportunity and strengthen the perception of their character; or better yet, strengthen their actual combativeness.

4. Success in social media may predict overall success

While there is still no front runner among the Republicans, Barack Obama is clearly erasing Hillary Clinton’s lead. We would posit that Obama’s online buzz, as measured by Traackr, might serve as a good predictor of future progress throughout the campaign.
To learn more about what Traackr can do for you and your campaigns, visit us at www.traackr.com

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