A friend of mine, an occasional Republican, was amused by laments from Minnesota Republican activists that the GOP lost the November elections because the party failed to connect with voters via social media. “That’s like saying there was static on the line, so all they need to do is change the color of the telephone,” he said.
What many Republicans fail to grasp is that, during the 2012 election cycle, their message of smaller government and fiscal responsibility was eclipsed by a message of exclusion. In Minnesota, the marriage and voter ID amendments, coupled with ill-timed national comments about “legitimate” rape, indicated that, far from wanting to connect, the Republican Party wanted to shut out certain groups of voters.
In other words, Mark Zuckerberg himself could not have created a social media strategy that would have helped Republicans last November.
If, however, Republicans had approached social media and data mining the way many businesses do today, they might have learned that connecting on line goes both ways. If Republicans had held that virtual conversation, they would have learned a thing or two about the mood of the voters they wanted to attract.
“What we have in the social media phenomena is hundreds of millions of people of interest to political parties, people who are doing what they like to do in an online locale – expressing what they care about, what issues matter to them,” said Ravi Bapna, director of the University of Minnesota’s Social Media and Business Analytics Collaborative (SOBACO), a new program that crosses multiple disciplines.
Data mining
Business people enroll in SOBACO’s executive program to learn not just how to push their message or brand or product to an online audience. First, they learn how to pull -- to find out what their audience is thinking and saying. Call it data-mining 101.
In the SOBACO program, students learn how to use social media, in all its permutations, as a giant sandbox where insight into consumer – or voter – preferences is there for the sifting. Bapna says the goals are the same for a political campaign or a cereal company.
“The challenge is to truly understand who these people are. It’s not about whether you are signed up as a Republican or registered as Democrat,” Bapna said. “It’s a finer level of familiarity. I may be a liberal but I do care about abortion or I may be conservative but I am socially liberal.”
In forums where Minnesota Republicans have gathered to identify ways to move the party forward, participants nodded in agreement at the importance of social media, but they defined it as a tactic, a digital megaphone, not a tool for developing strategy. Just a few more tweets, and we would have won two more seats, seemed to be their conclusion.
But at SOBACO and at consulting companies that specialize in digital marketing, learning how to use social media doesn’t start with establishing a Twitter account.
Bapna believes that social media is predictive, that it gives the data-miner insight into the fundamentals of human behavior.
“Are you altruistic? Are you visually-oriented? The smarter organization learns about these people,” before it starts selling, he said. “Social media really should be a very important data point that goes into your product funnel.”
Out of kilter
Social listening is the key to finding out which part of the product is out of kilter, according to Bapna. “I think a politician or a party would be well served if they had this ability to get this sense,” he said.
Then, he counsels, the next step is to use the network in a targeted way: finding who is connected to whom, finding the influencers, and getting the voter engaged.
This is the social graph that Republicans needed to overlay on their voter lists. This is their weakness in using social media.
When the party does decide to improve its social media skills, they will find it’s a two-way street. They will learn they need to listen before they talk.