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rom the first elections in the Athenian agora to #Elxn41 there is only one test of campaign success that matters: voters persuaded to come out and vote for you. This campaign started and ended with breathless cover- age of how this was Canada’s first “Twitter Election,” the social media campaign of social media campaigns. Can they tell you how many voters were moved to vote using these new technologies? Self-proclaimed experts (I know the breed – I’ve unfor- tunately used the moniker to describe my job description on more than one occasion) were called upon to provide a daily accounting of who said what; who was tweeting the most; who had the best performance on Facebook; who had the best videos; and on and on until they exhausted ev- ery buzzword available in The Consultant’s Guide to Buzz- words That Might Impress Your Clients. Here are some of the “findings” of we heard from the


experts: • The disproportionate number of viral anti-Conserva- tive online campaigns is proof of Harper’s unpopu- larity in the polls. • Seems to be as reliable a metric as polling data. How many pollsters predicted a Conservative majority? • Negative ads don’t work in social media. • Except for when they do. Ask Michael Ignatieff how that turned out.


• YouTube subscribers are a measure of loyalty. • Maybe. But YouTube loyalty doesn’t win you elec- tions. If it did, Michael Ignatieff would be Canada’s 23rd Prime Minister. While the experts had a lot to say, in retrospect, they completely missed the point. Sure, their assessment may have been applicable in a consumer marketing or public relations environment, but political campaigns are a com- pletely different animal. We can’t blame them. Most of them have probably never


worked on a political campaign. They likely did what you or I would do in that situation: type “social media best prac- tices” into the Google machine and see what comes up. Ah, there we go: social media is about having a conversation with the online community; you need to listen and then engage people; you should let loose and get social; and for heaven’s sake, you need to be positive – always positive. Oh, did we mention that you have to engage? Engagement is the solution to all our campaign needs. Engage, engage, en- gage. By some leap of logic means we’re to conclude that the same principles apply to political campaigns. Rubbish.


Those best practices work if you’re selling a soft drink. Political campaigns have an entirely different objective. It’s not about getting the most number of followers. It’s not about receiving more “likes” than the other guy. It’s not even about achieving the most number of views


on YouTube. Those numbers only matter to journalists focused on the horse race, journalists who don’t mind writing a story with


incomplete data. These numbers simply don’t tell the whole story. Social media experts can call themselves experts if they like, but unless they’re working on the campaign and have access to internal data, they are in no position to ac- curately assess a campaign’s social media success. Why? Because a social media campaign is not a horse


race. It’s an activation and mobilization effort with one sole objective: to get out the vote.


Social media experts can call themselves experts if they like, but unless they’re working on the campaign and have access to internal data, they are in no position to accurately assess a campaign’s social media success. Why? Because a social media campaign is not a horse race. It’s an activation and mobilization effort with one sole objective: to get out the vote.


Which means you can have all the conversations you


want, or you can out-tweet the living daylights out of your opponents, but if you’re not activating your supporters to mobilize the vote, what good is any of it? Experts told us that all parties in this election were guilty


of waging top-down, broadcast campaigns that failed to em- brace the two-way nature of social media. Apparently, this is enough information to conclude that the parties ran “old- style” campaigns. Again, rubbish.


That a campaign doesn’t embrace two-way dialogue tells us absolutely nothing about whether the campaign was a hashtag fail or not. In order to get a true sense of how successful any of the campaigns were, we’d need the following information:


1. The number of votes cast for each party as a result of the campaigns’ social media efforts. If the point of a political campaign is to get out the vote,


then the social media campaign should be designed to mo- bilize this vote. It’s not about persuading people to vote for your candidate, although that might be a peripheral effect of a good social media campaign. It’s about finding your supporters online, giving them a role to play on by appeal- ing to their slactivisit nature and then working them up the advocacy ladder (we’ll get to that in momentarily). The more people you find, the more opportunities you


have to mobilize people. The more people you mobilize, the more votes you can get on Election Day. How successful was the campaign in using social media to get out the vote?


June 2011 | Campaigns & Elections 53


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