Why Are Political Lawn Signs Like YouTube Downloads?

The Paine of Measurement

How online measures of engagement have predicted recent primary results.

Ever wondered what the effectiveness of political lawn signs is? Supposedly, every lawn sign represents six votes for the candidate. Or maybe ten votes, depending on what you read. And there's a theory in political circles that if you can get someone to put out a lawn sign, then that person is committed enough to not just vote for you, but also to encourage his or her friends to vote for you as well. So, each additional lawn sign means more than just one more vote, it means more of something even more valuable and a lot more difficult to pin down: more loyalty or commitment or what we in communications call engagement.

To my knowledge, no one has ever done a scientific study of how lawn sign displays influence voting habits. But my completely unscientific study of New Hampshire lawns this fall more or less predicted the outcome of our First in the Nation primary: Everywhere you went there were lots of Obama and Ron Paul signs, and both did much better than the polls predicted.

Now let's transfer this scenario into the world of social media. Can online measures of engagement predict votes? I argue that they can and have done so recently:

• Our YouTube study of candidates showed Obama having a significant lead over Hilary Clinton both in terms of viewership, and in terms of the number of videos that were rated by viewers.
• On Facebook we noted that there were some 500,000 plus groups supporting Obama, compared to Hillary's 100 or so. (In fact there are far more groups opposed to Hillary than there are those in favor.)
• In terms of Facebook's US Politics application that has Facebook voters register their opinions on a variety of topics as well as on the candidates themselves, Obama has consistently maintained a 50- to 60-point lead over Clinton.

And in the end, Obama did better in the primaries than the early polls suggested. The primary results have proven that Obama has a stronger than expected following, as hinted at by the strong online engagement we found.

The point here about engagement is bigger than just politics. How and why is engagement a stronger or different measure than just impressions? If, by joining a group, rating a video, or following someone on Twitter, you are actually thinking or behaving differently than if you just viewed an ad or a message, then measuring these signs of engagement is critical to every marketer. In order to hang on to advertising dollars, media companies will need to provide this data. And the good news is that the data is there, they just need to release it.

And finally, I can't help but see engagement as a kind of bridge between measuring outputs and measuring relationships. (Most of you are aware of my recently published book Measuring Public Relationships, learn more here.) If you measure an output like impressions, you only know what has happened to an audience. But if you measure engagement, you are measuring what is done by an audience as the result of their relationship with your output. How does measuring engagement fit in with measuring relationships? That's a good question, let me know if you have the answer.

Here's wishing you large measures of success,