The next US president will be a social media expert

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The next US president will be a social media expert


15 March 2012 by Peter Aldhous

Like (Image: Hill Street Studios/Getty Images)


Tweets and Likes may be the key to winning hearts and minds in the US presidential race

"WE JUST made history," tweeted Barack Obama, shortly after claiming victory in the 2008 US presidential election. If that contest proved the value of social media as a campaigning tool, this election season will provide a historic test for the emerging industry of social media analytics.

Savvy political operatives want to build analyses of social media activity into the sophisticated data models they now use to aim campaign messages at the right individuals. Start-up companies are touting custom tools that both measure a candidate's ability to reach and influence voters and help them optimise that skill. Academics, meanwhile, are trying to detect automated online "attack posts" masquerading as spontaneous political discussion.

Since Obama showed the way, developing a social media strategy has become a must for serious political candidates. "It is cheap, and has the possibility of exciting a younger generation," observes Panagiotis Metaxas, a computer scientist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, who studies the role of social media in politics.



There is no shortage of firms marketing ways to measure the impact of social media. From its US base in San Francisco, for instance, Socialbakers is pumping out a bewildering array of statistics rating the Facebook pages of candidates running for US president. These include a metric called Engagement Rate, which measures reactions to candidates' posts on their sites, and People Talking About, which assesses the extent to which other Facebook users share candidates' posts on their own walls.

The message from these measures is mixed. In late February, Republican front runner Mitt Romney led his rivals on the People Talking About metric, but his Engagement Rate trailed the rest of the field. Rick Santorum had the lowest number of Facebook fans but was gaining new ones at the fastest rate. It remains to be seen whether any of this will translate into electoral success, but campaigns should be able to see whether tweaking their social media output is having the desired effect.

The killer app for social media analytics, however, would be helping campaigns to deliver messages calculated to push the buttons of particular voters, and identify supporters who need extra attention to make sure they actually turn out on polling day. This is called microtargeting, and lies at the heart of modern political campaigning.

Getting the sample sizes for effective microtargeting through traditional opinion polling is prohibitively expensive. So campaigns have turned to data-mining techniques that extract publicly available data on electoral registration and individuals' history of turning out to vote. Then they link this with masses of other information available from companies such as consumer data firm Experian, including whether voters own their home, what magazines they subscribe to and so on. Add in data on the views of a subset of these people gleaned from a campaign's polling and other direct contacts, and it is possible to build statistical models to predict how individual voters will respond to a particular message.

Such methods can be used to send different direct mailings to voters who happen to live next door to each other, but have been identified as belonging to different subgroups. For instance, a Republican candidate probably wouldn't want to send messages berating Obama's policies on contraception couched as an attack on religious freedom to a young woman likely to be a swing voter concerned about reproductive health.

In theory, how people behave on social media could provide a massive boost to microtargeting. "We're swimming in real-time information about likes, retweets and clicks," says Patrick Ruffini of Engage in Washington DC, which crafts digital media campaigns for political clients.

The difficulty lies in linking Twitter accounts and Facebook pages to the individuals in campaigns' voter databases. At present, there is no way to do this other than to manually research each account, says Alex Lundry, director of research with TargetPoint Consulting in Alexandria, Virginia, which includes the Romney campaign among its clients. "A large brick wall separates the digital from the real," he says.

That hasn't stopped politicians using social media as a conduit for launching surreptitious attacks against rivals.

Metaxas and his colleague Eni Mustafaraj spotted one such attack in January 2010, during the race to fill a Massachusetts Senate seat. This "Twitter bomb" consisted of tweets sent from nine accounts, directly addressed to individual Twitter users, apparently selected at random, and linking to a website that attacked the Democratic candidate Martha Coakley.

The website was registered on the same day as the accounts were created, using a service that hides the owner's identity. Two months after Coakley lost the election to Republican Scott Brown, it emerged that the site was the handiwork of a Republican group in Iowa involved in previous attacks on Democratic candidates.

Researchers led by Filippo Menczer of Indiana University in Bloomington have since developed an automated system to detect similar activity. But if it doesn't spot anything suspicious, that could mean that candidates have found a better way to manipulate Twitter and Facebook by seeding them with attack ads disguised as grassroots political chatter. "What we have seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg," Menczer suggests. "We have only found the most obvious, perhaps naive examples."



Source: www.newscientist.com