The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

What Latin America and the Mid-East Think of the U.S. Elections, as Revealed by Social Media

النتائج الأولية بدأت تظهر.. يارب كريم انصر أوباما..

"Announcement of the initial results has begun. Oh God, please let Obama win!" --a tweet from Battal Algoos

by Katie Delahaye Paine

Regardless of how you might feel about the presence or absence of “fair and balanced” reporting in the traditional media, its role is one of reporting election results in a factual manner. Not so social media; as the unvarnished voice of the people, it reveals the personal opinions that distinguish one voter from the next.

What the U.S. Political Talking Heads Were Really Talking About After the Election

by Katie Delahaye Paine

Recently, media outlets have been chock full of after-the-election opinion and commentary, and the political talking heads seem to have been especially busy. But those media outlets don't have access to the social media tweets and posts that reveal the raw and candid views of the pundits. So, to see what they were really talking about, KDPaine & Partners has analyzed over 3000 social media mentions from the top U.S. political influencers.

Did Anonymous Hack Karl Rove's Efforts to Hack the Presidential Election?

Now appearing in Facebook and other respected news outlets is the claim that underground hacker group Anonymous sabotaged GOP operative Karl Rove's plans to rig the election. The biggest story to come out of the election is the strategic and efficient use of data, so the possibility that nefarious groups waged behind-the-scenes data warfare makes perfect sense. At least as a movie plot. See Schneier On Security for a levelheaded discussion of this scenario. -- Bill Paarlberg, editor

The Measurement Lesson from Election 2012: Data Made the Difference

The Paine of Measurement

A flood of cash began to pour into politics within months of the January 2010 Citizen's United decision. More than $6 billion was spent on the recent presidential and congressional races. But I would argue that never has so much money been spent for so little result. And it wasn’t just one presidential candidate that lost; the vast majority of candidates targeted by the super PACs lost as well.

Nate Silver, Measurement Geek of the Year

Nate Silver does it again!

Bringing a Moneyball revolution to the analysis of political polls, FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver has once again predicted the presidential election with stunning accuracy.

In the run-up to the election, Obama supporters clung to Silver's re-election-leaning predictions like babies to their pacifiers. Meanwhile critics accused him of mixing bad data with good to cook his numbers.

TIME Magazine: What Fueled the Priciest Election in U.S. History?

Here's an informative infographic from TIME magazine: "What fueled the priciest election in U.S. history?" Notice that Romney's campaign staffers made twice as much as Obama's, but Obama had almost 3 times as many field offices.

Political Print & Social Media Analysis in the Coolest Interactive Infographic Ever

Brandwatch provides a political share-of-media infographic that you'll love playing with. You can compare the amount of Twitter and print discussion on 30 policy topics between media and candidates by state and time period. Pretty colors!

Brandwatch claims this technique reveals "the true thoughts of voters," better than surveys. But what can you really conclude by knowing, for instance, that Romney had more NH press and tweets than Obama about Israel and Palestine? There's a lot of information here, but to make sense of it requires a bit of extra thought. --Bill Paarlberg, editor

The U.S. Election: Postcards from Across the Pond

by Lucas Galan, Associate Director Research and Insight, Salience Insight

When GFK polled Europeans on their attitudes towards the U.S. back in 2009, the influence of Obama’s leadership was decidedly apparent. Europeans felt optimistic about Obama’s presidency, sensing that he would usher in a return to a better, more responsible U.S. influence on the rest of the world. The so-called ‘Obama Effect’ was ostensible beyond polls, its sometimes naïve eagerness embodied responses such as Nobel Committee’s decision to award him the Nobel Peace Prize at the inception of his presidency.

And the Election Goes to... Nate Silver and the Mathemocratic Party

Whether you're pleased or not with the results of the recent U.S. elections, you've got to be thrilled at the landslide victory of Nate Silver and his FiveThirtyEight blog. Mr. Silver, The New York Times' polling guru and author of just-released "The Signal and the Noise," used canny aggregation of polling data to achieve uncannily accurate predictions. Moreover, he stuck to his guns in the face of withering doubt and criticism from conservative pundits. As the Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective says: "Silver appears to have ushered in a new level of credibility for statistical analysis in politics." See that article for an analysis of his methods. There's a good summary at The Week, see also Business Insider. And if you doubt that statisticians are sexy, see "Nate Silver, Sex Object." --Bill Paarlberg, Editor (A big, big, big, thanks to Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective for the image.)

The Globally Enraged: 28% of Consumers Believe Business and Government Are Out to Screw Them

% of respondents who feel a lot of anger when thinking about their country today

Recent research on the reputation of large corporations reveals they could use some good PR. At least.

As part of its on-going Global MONITOR research, The Futures Company, the global strategic insight and innovation consultancy, polled 28,000 adults in 21 markets. Among the results:

• 86% think big business maximizes profits at the expense of customers and communities;
• 85% agree that large corporations exert a greater level of influence on government than citizens do; and
• About 50% felt "a lot" of anger about each of these issues.

Measuring Campaigns: Does Buying Impressions Result in Votes?

The Paine of Measurement

by Katie Delahaye Paine

Regardless of who is elected in November, this presidential election will either prove or disprove what has been up until now an essentially unshakeable belief: Buying impressions leads to desired outcomes. In this article we'll do a quick analysis of the current presidential campaign to see if that still holds true. First, some background...

Charting a Comparison of Global Election Spending: Infographic

This month's Chart of the Month was researched and produced by Lucas Galan of Report International. (That's it over to the left, click on it to see it larger.) Here he provides some background on how and why it was developed.

With the US presidential election at a predicted price tag of $2.5bn, one is left wondering just how much is too much spending in the campaign to name the leader of the free world. While some see this as a healthy expression of a passionate debate, for the majority the onslaught of day-to-day advertising warfare is not just repetitive, but wasteful.

We developed this month's chart to examine how the current U.S. election spending compares to that typical of the rest of the democratic world. Rather than looking at the individual markets and extrapolating their cost per vote -- after all, the U.S.’s 131m voting populace is not immediately comparable with the U.K.’s 27m -- we tailored a rest-of-the-first-world sample to be of the same size as the U.S.’s electorate. We combined the voting numbers from the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Canada, arriving at the sum of 129m voters in elections from 2007-2011.

Can the Reputation of Paul Ryan Be Saved?

"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently." --Warren Buffett

Sometimes it doesn’t even take 5 minutes -- but 5 seconds, or 140 characters. Many’s the politician these days that has come to regret a few thoughtless words. But few have failed as fast and as spectacularly as U.S. vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan.

A Measurement Makeover for the Obama and Romney Campaigns

Summary: For years, political campaigns have measured success simply by number of votes and the number of wins and losses. The current U.S. presidential campaign is the most expensive ever. No matter who wins, come November 7 there will be people wondering how they could have spent all that money more wisely. The good news is that there is probably enough data to tell them.

Here's what they should be doing...

Three Examples of How to Measure the Health of Political Campaigns -- Before Anyone Votes

by Katie Delahaye Paine

When measuring the health of political campaigns, as with any measurement program, the type of system you put in place depends on your objectives and your role. Below are examples of three types of political measurement, with a list of tools you need for each type of program.

How the Rest of the World Sees U.S. Politics: A Global Perspective on the Presidential Elections

(Click here to download the report Global Perspectives on the US Election now. This post is reprinted from Katie Paine's PR Measurement blog.)

I've been spending quite a bit of time in the Middle East of late, in my role as Chief Marketing Officer for News Group International.  One of the first things I realized is the wealth of information and resources we have under one roof. 

NYTimes: Interactive Bubble Chart of Words Used at Republican Convention

Head over to the New York Times ("At the Republican Convention, the Words Being Used") and play with the interactive bubble chart that measures how often speakers at the Republican Convention use common words. You can add your own word or phase and see how it plays. I added "war" (used 12 times) and "peace" (used 2 times).

---WTP

The Twitter Political Index

If everyone was on Twitter, would we need to vote?

The Twitter Political Index is a daily measurement that evaluates the sentiment of Twitter users' (and only Twitter users) feelings about presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Below is what the page looks like. You can read more about the "Twindex" in this ABC News article, which says:

The company has teamed up with a social media analytics firm named Topsy to analyze tweets with different words related to the campaign. Topsy looks at a number of things in a tweet — words, phrases, combinations of words, etc. — when assigning a positive or negative rating. Like an approval rating, the index scale runs from zero to 100. Topsy and Twitter are also working with two polling firms – Mellman Group and North Star Opinion Research.

Read more about the Twindex at TopsyLabs.

Notice that Obama has over 10 times as many followers as Romney. Wouldn't we then expect Romney's results to have more variability than Obama's? Would any other effects  be expected from the large difference in followers? --Bill Paarberg, Editor

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Politics and Pornography Consumption, by Way of Public Relations Measurement

Can research get any more exciting? Read on, as public relations measurement tools are used to demonstrate a relationship between the outcome of political campaigns and voter’s consumption of pornography.

Last fall, The Economist ran an article (“Rising to the occasion: Electoral victory brings a surprising consequence: the winners look at smut”) on recent research demonstrating that American men tend to look at more pornography after they’ve voted for a winning political candidate. The research extended the challenge hypothesis (testosterone goes up in males after successful competitions) by way of using Wordtracker and Google Trends to track the number of searches for pornographic keywords.

And just today I read David Brooks’ post The Thrill of Victory, which reports on a soon to be released update of the previous study:

In a forthcoming study for the journal Computers in Human Behavior, Patrick Markey and Charlotte Markey compared Internet searches in red and blue states after the 2006 and 2010 elections. They found that the number of searchers for pornography was much higher right after the 2010 election (a big G.O.P. year) than after 2006 (a big Democratic year). Conversely, people in blue states searched for porn at much higher rates after 2006 than after 2010.

Fascinating.

--Bill Paarlberg, editor of Measure What Matters and The Measurement Standard. The Measurement Standard is a publication of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement.

Ask the Expert at Pew Research Center

The Ask the Expert blog at the Pew Research Center includes some fascinating questions, with answers by Pew staff. Including:

• To what degree does my having only a cell phone restrict my availability for surveys?
• How accurate are the statistics derived from Pew Research polls when applied to the population of the United States?
• How statistically accurate is an online poll in which participants sign on to contribute their opinions?
• How many people would say that they believed in God if they were able to answer with complete anonymity?
• What kind of response do you get to mail versus phone versus e-mail polling?