Submitted for: Summer 2010 Edition

In the last few election cycles here in Canada, social media has played a larger role in how campaigns present themselves to voters.  While online campaigning was seen in the middle part of the decade as a stunt or an interesting footnote to be mentioned in a wider media story on the campaign, the bigger story has become how essential campaigning online has become to achieving electoral success.

Election campaigns of all political stripes have enthusiastically embraced the concept of having a strong digital presence – to the point where more often than not the online campaign occupies a prominent place on the internal organizational flow chart.   Online campaigns have gone from assets (websites, email accounts) to full voter engagement on blogs, social networks, forums and interactive advertising.

The arrival of social media in a campaign environment comes as no surprise to those who have followed and chronicled the rise in prominence of this versatile communications tool.  Successive surveys have shown that Canadians widely embrace and use social media in their daily live – and that trend is quickly moving upwards.  A 2009 survey from Vancouver-based 6S Marketing which polled 10,000 Canadians showed that 70% of Canadian use some kind of social media and 61% of businesses track what people are saying about their brand online.

US-based Forrester Research, which regularly tracks social media usage in a variety of countries, offers that Canada has the most active social networkers in any market they survey.  In an interview with the Vancouver Sun, principle analyst Nate Elliott stated: “I can’t imagine a marketer who would ignore something that this many Canadians are using.  If you are not participating in social media right now as a marketer, then you are late.”

The overwhelming pervasiveness of social media in the lives of Canadian casts aside the idea that online social networking is merely a passing fad.   For definitive proof, just follow the money:  Canadian marketers – whose primary purpose is to draw the public’s ever-fleeting attention to their product or service – have indicated that they will continue to increase the percentage of their advertising budgets online.

So it is not a surprise that the Canadian political community is following suit.  As it gets harder and harder to get voters on the phone or at the door in their homes, campaigns are looking for new ways to connect with voters.  Enter social media.

The standard campaign in 2010 has a full offering of campaign activities.   To be viewed as a viable contemporary campaign, not only do you need a fully interactive website; you need a Facebook page, Twitter account, branded social network and reams of videos, blog posts and comments on your digital outposts.

Campaigners across Canada are becoming ever more fluent in communicating online.  As technology becomes cheaper and more accessible, they are being added to the political messaging toolkit.  Why only put your release on the wire when you can post it to your site, or better yet, your Twitter account in real time?  Want folks to see how many enthusiastic supporters you had at your campaign rally?  Post the highlights in a video on YouTube.

But ask any experienced campaign manager and they’ll quickly throw out the old chestnut that politics is about managing scarcity: campaigns never have enough time, money or volunteers.  So, the shiny new application you want to build for the campaign quickly hits the brick wall of a tight budget when it comes time to make a decision on where to spend those increasingly scare dollars.  Further, in such a short writ period decisions on where to deploy the limited number of volunteers and/or staff a campaign possesses take on crucial importance.

What campaign management is looking for is this: a measurement of the return on investment, or ROI.   In other words, what do I get back for the dollars I spend on any kind of an online campaign?   Or the more commonly asked question: how many votes will this get me?

Undoubtedly a fair question.    In most cases, any resources dedicated to social media or online campaigning are resources that need to be taken from other budgets or departments; it’s not a zero sum game; so every director, manager or volunteer assigned to deploy your campaign’s online efforts must demonstrate that there are measurable benefits (read: votes) that can be directly attributed to your online campaign.

This, of course, is difficult (if not downright frustrating) for those heading up the online portion of any campaign.  Other, more costly and resource intensive activities aren’t subjected to the same demands of accountability.  When was the last time a campaign manager asked “How many votes did that sign get us?”

Nevertheless, campaigns will not hesitate to spend a significant portion of their budgets on voter outreach programs that are widely accepted as good investments of campaign dollars: direct mail, phone banks, signs, daemon dials, etc, without having an actual handle on the ROI they received in return.

Such direct voter contact activities are seen by campaign leadership as a valuable tool – the more you contact targeted or accessible voters, the more they are likely to hear (and presumably, like, you’ve done your research) your message.  And all sales rely on repetition, repetition, repetition.  So the more often you are statistically likely to contact a voter, the more likely they are to pick up what you’re putting down, as it were.

The good news is that the marketing world – which has a good 4-5 years on the realm of politics in terms of social media adoption – is asking these same questions.  Since the online world exploded in popularity and activity, businesses have been struggling to determine exactly how to measure the results from the money and time they spend on social media and what impact (if any) that expenditure had on sales and revenue.

The bad news is that there is no one universal way to measure the ROI from a wide variety of social media activities.  How much is a positive comment on Facebook worth?  What portion of an increase in sales can be attributed to our activity on Twitter?   Will an endorsement by a prominent blogger have a measurable impact on revenue and therefore profit?

These are the questions social media experts and engaged businesses continue to struggle with as they work to justify engaging their target online community.  There are a few case studies that show a direct link between social media usage and sales – Dell Computers sold $3 million in hardware through Twitter – but for the most part measuring ROI is still part science, part assumption.

The upside is that online activities are becoming easier to track – and more analytical tools are being developed to further dig into and understand online activity.  You have metrics to track the activity on your website (visits, pageviews), Twitter (mentions), YouTube (views, likes), blogs (comments, votes), Facebook (likes) and of course email (opens, forwards).   This is one huge advantage the online portion of your campaign has over more traditional methods of campaigning; so it’s important to use them to benchmark and track your progress.

But how do you use all the data to track your campaign’s social media ROI?  To determine how best to measure ROI, it’s important to first determine what you’re trying to achieve.  Obviously, having the most voters cast their ballot for your candidate is the ultimate goal, but there are many smaller goals that can be realized on the path to the final goal.

The first should be traffic – how many people are checking your candidate out and being exposed to your material.  This is one of the easiest metrics to track, although it is decidedly much more difficult to conclude what that traffic means.  As I mentioned, traffic can be best measured by visits of a sites pages, posts or views of video content or pictures.  Regularly measuring traffic will give you a good sense the kind of momentum you have or what kind of content attracts the most visitors.

The second metric is what I will call “popularity”.  How many people offer their support by liking your candidate’s Facebook page, mention your candidate online or in places like Twitter or share your campaign’s content.  This type of use engagement can serve as an excellent, albeit imprecise, indicator of how well your candidate is doing vis-a-vis your competitor.

In the 2008 Presidential contest, Barack Obama has 380% more friends on Facebook than his rival, John McCain.  Obama’s YouTube channel boasted 18 million views while McCain’s were just over 2 million.  Barack Obama has 112,474 followers to McCain’s 4,603.   Of course, you didn’t need to read social media statistics to realize Barack Obama had momentum behind him.  But what these stats really say is that Barack Obama was generating much more interest.  And this wide ranging engagement gave Obama a huge advantage over his opponent in being able to push his message out to the wider public through multiple channels.

The recent Massachusetts Senate race offers another prime example of where interest or popularity online can offer a strong indication of voter preference.  Even when pollsters had the contest between Republican Scott Brown and Democrat Martha Coakley in a dead heat, social media metrics indicated that Brown would best Coakley on Election Day.

Brown has a 10:1 advantage on YouTube views, almost 4 times as many friends on Facebook and was mentioned over twice as many times mentions on Twitter than his rival.  It is well established how important buzz is to creating the “Big Mo”; and Brown had it going into the final stretch of the campaign.   How intensely individuals are engaging your campaign online can be a direct indication of how well you’ll do at the polls.

The third metric is probably the single most important one to track – conversion rates.  In business, conversion rates refer to someone coming to your site and actually taking concrete action, such as filling out a contact form or phoning your sales office.  A high conversion rate translates to a high ROI on social media expenditures.

Political engagement can be measured in the exact same manner.  Tracking a voter as the visit your site, engaging your online campaign and ultimately signing up to support your candidate or donate and/or volunteer for your campaign.

The most effective way of get the most accurate conversion rates is to separate your “recruitment” or “action” pages from the rest of your online content.  You want to be able to direct interested parties to specific areas without cluttering your data with regular visitors looking for information.  Steering your visitors in such a direct way will assist in higher conversion rates – studies show the more clicks a visitor has to make, the more likely they are to not complete the transaction.

To maximize conversion rates, your forms should be as easy to fill out as possible.  You want folks to get their contact or payment information to you as quickly as possible.  If you are asking people to donate, make sure you have as many forms of payment as you can; if you are recruiting for volunteers, get an e-mail rather than a phone number and if you need to ask for a phone number, don’t make it a requirement for completion.   Data indicates that people just don’t want to give out their phone numbers  – and completion rates drop off when you make that a prerequisite.

You can and should track conversion rates on everything: your online and search advertising – while testing different ad copy, images and URLs to ascertain which is most effective); all of your links and various URLs; email blasts; your campaign tweets; your referring sites that generate traffic (is it an online newspaper? A particular blogger, or website?  A video?); anywhere your campaign is mentioned.

It is no longer good enough just to have an online presence – you need to be measuring how effective it is and whether your efforts are having a measurable positive impact on the success of your campaign.