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2. The number of voters identified through social media In order to determine how many people were motivated
to vote as a result of your online efforts, you need to con- duct some good old-fashioned voter ID. What good is it to have 1,000 followers if you’re the candidate for Barrie and all your followers are in Toronto? Tweet away if you like, but you better hope your followers are motivated to drive to Barrie on Election Day and partake in get out the vote efforts. Anything short of that and you’re wasting your time. In a perfect world, the bulk of your followers actually live
in your riding and the time you spend communicating to them, even having a “conversation” with them is time well spent; especially if you can motivate them to recruit more supporters. Your task is to identify these people and pull them into the campaign.
3. The number of voters each campaign was able to reach
As an extension to the previous point, you don’t want to spend all your time talking to supporters. That would be the equivalent spending your entire time knocking on sup- porters’ doors when you’re out canvassing. Unless you won with a 20,000-vote margin the last time around, any good campaign manager worth their weight in salt will tell you to quickly move on to the next house.
Of course, it’s not that easy online. People have adopted social media so they can socialize; not so they can be sub- jected to aggressive persuasion tactics. This is where sup- porters become your most valuable assets. If they do the yeoman’s work of carrying your message to new audiences, you might have a chance at persuading them, and in turn activate them. In social media lingo, we’re talking about sec- ondary reach. How effective are you at producing content that gets shared by your supporters to their personal net- works? If you have a high resonance rate, and you’re reach- ing a broader audience, and you’re conducting Voter ID on your secondary audience, you’ll have a pretty good assess- ment of where things stand.
4. Effectiveness of the campaign’s ability to work people up the advocacy ladder I’d be hard pressed not to write a social media article without using at least one buzzword. So here it is: the ad- vocacy ladder. It’s a simple concept, and one of these days I’ll come up with a more original name for it and pretend it’s my idea, but for now, it’ll do. In short, it pretty much describes how we get people
to take increasingly demanding actions in support of the campaign. The idea is to provide even the most casual sup- porters with ways get and stay involved with the campaign. Your task is to work them up the ladder, asking them to move on from simply liking a Facebook page to knocking on doors, making phone calls, and getting out the vote on Election Day.
Only a campaign can accurately measure how effectively
it is moving people up the ladder. No outsider can measure this, because no outsider has access to the campaign’s lists.
5. Success of each campaign in building their lists Lists are gold. A well-cultivated list allows the campaign to raise more money, reach new audiences, and ultimately mobilize the vote on e-day. As you’re conducting voter identification, you’re devel- oping segmented lists of supporters and adding them to your voter contact tools. The social media team’s task is to add to this list. Just as a riding’s canvassing director’s task is to knock on as many doors as possible to determine who’s a supporter, who’s undecided and who’s a sympathizer for opponents. The social media team should be doing the same with its list, and adapting their efforts accordingly. Again, that’s the kind of rich data no self-proclaimed so- cial media expert has access to, which means none of the talking heads from #elxn41 can tell you who had the best social media campaign. This one included. But we’re working on it!
Joseph Lavoie is a consultant with Navigator in their social media practice. He has been the architect of some of Canada’s most comprehensive activation and public advocacy campaigns. He can be reached at jlavoie @
navltd.com
54 Campaigns & Elections | Canadian Edition
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