How Social Media Picked The Last Presidential Nominees

As I've said before, I'm taking a class to get a certification in Social Media. This week, we went over a timely case study of one company and how they predicted the outcome of the 2008 Primaries well by looking at how the candidates used Social Media.

At the time, the leaders for the Democrats were John Edwards and Hillary Clinton. For the Republicans, Mitt Romney and John McCain held the public's attention. So, the social media company created a grading criteria to track the candidate's social media use. The candidates were graded on 1. Awareness 2. Publicity and 3. Importance.

They installed the SEO Quake plugin on each candidate's site to tell them the page's rank on Google, how many pages Google ranked and how many other sites are linking to the site. Then they looked at the Alexa Ranking, which is how many unique users are going to the site and how much time they're spending on the site.

They also used SEO Digger to find how many times the site comes up in the search engine searches. They also looked at how many videos were made about them, the number of friends, the number of blogs writing about the candidates, the use of Twitter. They also looked at how many emails they were sending out (probably asking for money).

From this they saw in August before the primaries that Obama and McCain would win their primaries. You may think this was a fluke or coincidence. Could be. But they then predicted Obama winning over McCain using these analysis.

Analytics are powerful. In the last race, social media was a major influencer. In this election, it's even more powerful. It can be powerful for you too. You just need to keep up with it or pay a content specialist to keep up with it.