Voting With Your Like Button?

We all just witnessed a wonderful case study in the use and misuse of social media by local interests. In the past few months as campaigning for the recent municipal elections was underway we saw mayoral candidates, city counsel hopefuls and people vying for other positions take to the social web to get their message out. While the elections are now over the record of these efforts remains frozen in the virtual amber on Facebook fan pages, Twitter account histories and the depths of YouTube's search results. Did you vote for the people you "liked" on Facebook? Did the counsel member with the most Twitter followers come out on top? What lessons can you and your business take from the social media campaigns of local politicians?

The first lesson in social media we should draw from the municipal elections is that the obvious metrics are hardly the most meaningful. It is tempting to correlate the number of Facebook fans or group members with a candidate's showing at the polls, but dig a little deeper and the situation is not so clear cut. Search out the fan pages of two or three people who ran for the same job and take a look at the list of friends. If any of your own friends clicked that "like" button their names will be filtered to the top of the list. What you will find is that the same people "liked" more than one candidate. This has everything to do with the fact that a click of a button means different things to different people and does not necessarily align with a person's voting intentions. The people who "liked" a candidate may have done so simply to get that candidate's updates to appear in their stream. Friend and follower counts are seductive because they are so readily available, but they are nothing more than a basic and imperfect measurement of a person or brand's reach. If your business relies on its Facebook friend count as a measure of success take heed.

Instead look at how these politicians actually interacted with people online. Did they answer questions and engage with the public, or merely broadcast press releases? Does it look like the actual individual candidate participated in the conversations, or does it seem like some surrogate associated with the campaign? If every statement made on the page reads like a well vetted and cleverly spun bit of PR then the real candidate was likely not interacting. Compare these observations to the election results. Did the person who had the most real conversations win? Did the candidate who merely used Facebook as a dumping ground for canned messages get anywhere? Did local people engage with the candidates online at all? The answers to these questions will help you understand how best to utilize Facebook for your business in your own community.

On Twitter search out the hashtags. These are markers that people attach to their messages to help indicate to observers that they are participating in a particular conversation. In St. Catharines, for example, the tag was #voteSTC. In Niagara Falls it was #voteNF. Toronto was, of course, #voteTO. Take a look at how many candidates interacted with the Twitter community and how many members of the public were actively talking about the election online. This is not only a great indication of how many people were participating, but it will also clue you in on who the social media influencers are in your community. The Twitter population may be smaller than Facebook's, but the regular users tend to have a disproportionately large sphere of influence.

In recent local commentaries all the wrong conclusions about social media and their effects on the elections have been drawn. Do not fall into the trap of merely comparing the success or failure of a candidate with their friend and follower counts. Look deeper and find those conversations. Who looked like a real person and who looked like they were going through the motions? Who is still engaging with people online after the campaign has closed? If you are bringing your own business into the social web, what can you learn from your community?

...from a series of Social Media articles I've been contributing to the Business Link newspaper, with editions in Niagara, Hamilton-Halton and Brantford.