Democrats Victorious Over Republicans On The Social-Media Front!

If you are like me even though you don’t live in the United States you have been anxiously following the American elections.  After all, the policies that are dictated in United States, and especially the foreign policies, are echo through-out the world.  Also, as a Liberal I am abhorred by what is going on with United States right now, the deterioration of their middle-class is in my opinion a national – dare I say global crisis.  Lower disposable income for Americans can affect many countries that are involved in heavy trade with them; definitely not good for us Canadians.

During the past week I have been following the speeches in both Democrat & Republican national conventions and I have to say I thought the caliber of speeches, delivery, and just the excitement in the air that existed during the DNC was head and shoulders above what was happening at RNC.  Now I might have a biased opinion do to my left-wing political leanings, so when I found some hard data confirming what I felt I was very excited and wanted to share this with you guys.  A company out of Cambridge Massachusetts called Bluefin that specializes in social-TV analytics has been tracking the social-media response to both of the telecasts, here are some very interesting results:

via Ad-Age

via Ad-Age

Bluefin tracked social media response to the campaigns via Twitter and public Facebook posts.  As you can see the numbers speak for themselves,  the Democratic convention reached 5 million comments during 4.5 hours spread over three nights – about 2.5 times the comments the Republican convention got based on the same amount of time.  In fact, the last night of the DNC with speeches by Vice President Joe Biden and President Barak Obama was the most socially charged night of the entire 2012 political season, reaching 2.5 million social-media comments in a 90 minute time span.  According to Mike Guigli of Bluefin, that one specific night was more social than all three nights of the GOP convention.  As time goes on and social-media meshes even more with our daily lives, it would interesting to see how well can pre-election social-media response/engagement and sentiment analysis predict the outcome of an election.  I am aware that perhaps right now the active social-media user demographics  favours the Democrats, taking into account age and education level (Ops! did I say that? Yes I did!), but as time goes on and we all become fully connected the data will become more reliable.  As for this election, lets hope that results seen above translate into the voting booths and the American middle-class gets a chance to shine once more!

[Source: Ad Age]

What’s That Now? Content Marketing is The New Saviour?

Yesterday I was reading Danny Brown’s blog (one of my favourites!) and came across a very interesting post titled “Sorry, Content Dudes, But It’s Just Plain Old Marketing“. In the posts Danny discusses all the hype around content marketing and its strong proponents. Danny raises the question whether it is content marketing that they are actually doing or just good old plain marketing. His belief is that content is merely a tactic and that at the end of the day the goal is still the same! Making the buyer fall in love with, and selling products, services, or expertise.

But that creation of content is simply a tactic in the bigger picture of marketing. The content is created to market the end product – you’re not marketing the actual content.

I do believe in the power of content to engage your audience, bring value-added benefits, and increase your sales, however, Danny is right; we shouldn’t think of this as a whole new type of marketing that will save the day, it is merely a tactic (and a damn good one) to add to your marketing arsenal. Now this brings me to another concern, have we as marketers become too obsessed with categorizing everything and constantly trying to rebrand ourselves? Are we being too hung up on fads rather than digging for the real meat? Have we started using all these labels to do better marketing, or to market ourselves better? Yes sir, I’m also a content marketing expert!

I guess what I am trying to say is let’s not get too bent out of shape over labels and jargon, these new techniques are merely tools brought about by modern technology and new paradigms of human interaction. At the end of the day these new tactics still need to be a part of an overall marketing effort, and cannot be relied on as an end-to-end solution.