Jay LeonardThe primaries in Pennsylvania were hard fought, especially the 11th district, where one of our clients, Bill Vinsko, happened to be running. In the end, his opponent came out on top, but I wanted to point out the real impact social media can have on an election day.
It is amazing to see the activity that happens on an important day like April 24, 2012. This is where politicians should always have their finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the media, public, and competition….in comes social media monitoring and real time updates.
Let’s take a look at the two channels we used to monitor and participate:
With a community of around 625 supporters on Vinsko’s Facebook page, we planned to share pictures at every stop on the campaign trail. The community reacted well, as you may know that pictures on Facebook generally receive the most amount of engagement. Here is a picture of Bill voting with his wife Paula.
Another planned piece of media was real time video updates at major points in the 11th district. As you can see below Bill has a great presence on camera, and it gave some life to the election day activities.
The real time nature of Twitter is a great asset to a campaign team. We were always on top of the latest news and commentary from the media, community, supporters, and opposition.
As you can imagine, we were kept busy with all the activity happening literally every second. We could also report back to Vinsko and his field team on when to expect an increase in voter turnout due to monitoring keywords that signified voting intent.
To give you a sense of what this feed looked liked, here is a screenshot from our Hootsuite dashboard:
To the General Election…
We’ll continue to oversee activity leading up to the big enchilada, and it should prove to be just as thought provoking and pretty darn fun if you’d ask me! Good luck to the remaining candidates.
Did you see politicians shining in the social media space during the primary season? If so, let us know in the comments below. We love case studies!
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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Interesting article. I was also watching both Vinsko and Stilp in this race. Since they had no TV spots, their social media presence was the best way to keep informed.
I actually felt Stilp did a much better job though. He only declared a couple of months ago and had to play catch up FAST to Vinsko. By election day, Stilp had effectively passed Vinsko’s numbers on Facebook and Twitter wasn’t even close. I think Stilp had 335 followers on Twitter, while Vinsko maintained about 15 last I checked. At the moment, it seems like his Twitter account has been taken down. Maybe so it won’t be analyzed for it’s lack of following?
Honestly, I believe Stilp won this race in social media. Take a look at the extensive coverage he had on his Facebook site and how connected he was on Twitter. Given the short amount of time he had to pull this off (about 4 months) it’s pretty impressive.
Would love to hear your thoughts and analysis…
Great article!
Thanks for the comment. I believe Stilp did a great job of going from 0-100mph in quite a short time. The reason I only mentioned election day is that we were contracted to perform day of monitoring and community management for that day. With that said, I believe we could have made a big impact if we were brought into the fold much earlier in the process.
This is an important lesson in any social media program. It’s about creating a real impact from the moment anyone starts in social media. Obviously getting super active for only 1 day won’t solve any problem. It’s about the long term with social media, and you reaffirmed that with your comment. Thanks!
I hope I didn’t offend anyone. I actually didn’t realize until after I commented, that the article was based on your own work with Mr. Vinsko.
It makes much more sense knowing you were brought in at the very end for one day. Had Mr. Vinsko contracted with you sooner, the outcome might have been different.
As you stated… This should be a lesson to all political candidates. Even if they don’t fully understand what is going on out in the social media sphere, they must accept the reality of it’s significance, and put the right amount of resource into it.
Thank you for the respectful and honest response.
Sorry for the delayed response! No offense taken! After seeing what insights social media brings to the table, there is no doubt in my mind that politicians are taking it more seriously. This is precisely the reason why we put our retainer clients through a robust training session before execution. They see it in a totally different light!