Featur e Understanding Online Measurement “Are we there yet?” By Mark Blevis
out-of-province license plates (at least, we did when I was a kid) while the adults track gas price and the number of fights in the back seat. I think we can all agree the best measure of achieving the goal is making good time with the family unit still intact. Political campaigns have specific goals: grow the base,
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secure voters, attract volunteers, and get donors. Like the road trip, there are countless ways to measure progress to- wards the goals along the way. Digital tools have expanded the number of metrics and the speed at which results be- come available. However, the expanded volume of infor- mation can be overwhelming. Take a breath.
Tools exist which help identify influencers and the magnitude of their reach. One popular tool for assessing influence on Twitter is Klout (
klout.com).
e learn to understand the importance of goals and measuring progress as young children. Con- sider the family road trip. Kids will count cows,
SOCIAL MEDIA AND ONLINE CONVERSATION Too many media reports cite the number of followers, fans,
likes and “friends” as the preeminent measure of online impact. Those numbers simply represent an accumulation of mouse clicks for what some people consider to be a show of support. There are many reasons this thinking is flawed. Among them, the click could be accidental; it might be necessary in order to access information inside a “walled garden”; and it could be the individual has “liked” each of his/her political candidates to more easily follow activity affecting their constituency. In fact, the “click” could even be the result of an automated piece of software called a “bot.” A more meaningful measure of online success is how
many participants are actively contributing to the conver- sation, or sharing articles, updates and other online content about your campaign with their own communities. It’s also important to track overall understanding and sentiment. Pay specific attention to the number of people doing the talking and sharing since they may represent an increase in the base of your online community. Another term you’re likely to hear is “key influenc- ers”. These are people who are deemed important because of the size of their personal online communities and the number of their “followers” who actively engage in dialog. Tools exist which help identify influencers and the mag- nitude of their reach. One popular tool for assessing influ- ence on Twitter is Klout (
klout.com). Like many tools, it generates an influence score based on a proprietary as- sessment algorithm. Klout was criticized following Char- lie Sheen’s arrival on Twitter. The night Mr. Sheen joined Twitter, he amassed half a million followers and a Klout score of 57 (out of 100) – impressive considering he hadn’t published any tweets. As much as some analysts love to hate these ranking tools, they’re the best we have and they generally do a reasonable job identifying the people at the centre of what I call Impact Networks.
WEB WEBSITE
Remember website hits? This once popular statistic counts how often someone or something (e.g. a search engine) accessed your website. Website metrics have become in- creasingly sophisticated. Hits have been dismissed in fa-
16 Campaigns & Elections | Canadian Edition
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