resonated with the public. In the end, our YouTube sta- tistics were showing that our audience was most engaged during the last minute of our video; Nenshi’s impact was increasing the longer the video played.”
Mobile Apps: Measuring Nenshi’s Impact My firm, Purple Forge, had a number of measuring sticks in play when Nenshi’s victory occurred, which allowed us to independently measure the power of his personal- ity. Purple Forge had developed two mobile apps for Cal- gary in 2010. One was the Calgary Stampede application. As most folks know, Calgary basically shuts down during Stampede, so let’s assume that Calgarians are fully engaged around Stampede. We had approximately 9000 downloads of our mobile app during Stampede.
Let’s call this the
100% mobile app engagement baseline. We also issued an app for the municipal election for the City of Calgary. It outlined simple information such as the location of your polling station based on your postal code, voter ID requirements and advanced voting infor- mation. We had over 4500 downloads of this application, measuring about 50% of the download rate for Calgary and very close to the 53% voter turnout. Einarson shared with me that Nenshi had roughly 2000
downloads of their mobile application. That ratio against the 4500 downloads of the municipal application, the voter base, comes very close to the 39% of the popular vote he achieved. As a higher order predictive measure of voter engage-
ment, mobile apps would therefore appear to track to real voting statistics.
Ottawa: The race was over before it started So back to Ottawa. What happened? Why didn’t Jim Watson and Larry O’Brien even get close to Nenshi’s or
McIver’s social media fan base numbers? Voter turnout in 2006 was a high 56% in Ottawa, and unquestionably this was due to the charismatic entrepre- neur-turned-politician Larry O’Brien.
Unfortunately a
protracted and politically damaging influence peddling trial (charges he was cleared of) dug a hole in his support base, and even with the passage of three major beneficial urban renewal projects, O’Brien had been unable to re- store the support he had mustered in the pre-social media Ottawa of 2006.
What Nenshi has been able to do is put a spotlight on what happens when authentic, charismatic candidates use the latest in technology to pursue their political ambitions.
Enter the Facebook “Like” button. Both candidates
started using social media for the first time in the spring of 2010. Jim Watson as a former mayor of Ottawa was already widely acclaimed in the press as the front-run- ner. By the time the election rolled around, Watson had captured 1200 Facebook “Likes” and O’Brien had over 500. While Watson was winning in the social media realm, neither candidate’s support number was large enough to indicate a significant amount of digital public engagement. On the mobile side, Purple Forge had also deployed the mobile iPhone app for O’Brien, which had a 40% engage- ment ratio against his social media base, which was well above the norm of 20 to 30% shown in successful mobile campaigns we have worked with. This demonstrated that
Measure your success against other mobile campaigns in your town. April 2011 | Campaigns & Elections 49
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