Election 2012 Social Media Barometer Dashboard for Candidates Obama and Romney [INFOGRAPHIC]

As the 2012 election season ramps up, we find ourselves viewing various polling data which purportedly convey who is dominating the race.  Rarely do the news outlets report on all the social data available to help interpret other underpinnings of the race dynamics regarding the public perception.  In other words, the narrative on the discussion of the campaign is largely devoid of social media metrics.

We, at Drake Direct, have constructed what we think is the first Social Media Infographic Dashboard for the Obama - Romney 2012 Election as shown below.

The following are thought to be the most important metrics for the upcoming election, from a social monitoring perspective:

• Share of Voice and related changes over time.  Share of voice is the percent of the total conversation each candidate dominates.
• Changes in Sentiment for a candidate and comparisons to each other.  Sentiment, on its own, can be inaccurate. However, in relation to the prior week, for example, or a competing brand or candidate,  it can be more reliable.
• Traffic Patterns to their political web sites and how those patterns are changing over time.
• What topics are trending for each candidate via word "clouds."
• How active each candidate is on Facebook and Twitter and, more importantly, how engaged their fan base and followers are in spreading the word which can involve the creation of a few new metrics.
• An overall measurement of social influence using Klout as a proxy.
• Understanding how people are using Google to search for more information on a candidate and where those searches are occurring geographically .
• Monitoring recent quotes and posts.

There are many tools available for monitoring social data and conversation.  Some are free; some are licensed.  We used a combination of both to construct the above dashboard and included:

• Lithium -  paid social monitoring software
• Netbase -  paid social monitoring software
• Tweetfeel - provides live tweet streaming on any give topic
• Socialmention - reveals various social metrics such as reach, passion and sentiment
• Google Insights - Google search trending tool 
• Alexa - tracking of web traffic and engagement metrics on competing web sites
• Compete - tracking of web traffic and engagement metrics on competing web sites (paid)
• Facebook Insights - for any brand page, reveals basic fan and engagement metrics
• Twitter - number of retweets per post
• Klout - social influence score

While there is little historical data on the relative strength of social media's impact or predictive power to guide us, we can still follow each candidate's campaign execution to see how his actions fuel our emotions and conversations.  Social media can enhance or detract from our perceptions of the one seeking office. Drake Direct does not endorse either candidate.

We will update this dashboard weekly, right up to the election.  So, subscribe to our feed to make sure you don't miss an update.

Hope you enjoy our Election 2012 infographic dashboard.  To download this week's infographic, just right click on the image and save.

If  Drake Direct's Marketing Data Scientists can help your business establish social media baselines and measurement standards, using similar dashboarding, please contact us for a free consultation.  We'd be happy to help. 

Best,
Perry and Rhonda

Note:  Before embarking on any social monitoring campaign, make sure you understand the tools, the metrics, and the issues surrounding them.  Many of the metrics in the social space are prone to error, such as sentiment.  In particular, looking at sentiment on its own and not, for example, comparing current to prior week or your competitor's figures can be misleading. These metrics must be indexed.  You just have to be careful.  We will have more to say on this in a future blog post.