POLITICS HEATS UP: USING SOCIAL MEDIA DATA TO LOOK AT THE REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES

Since we started looking at the political and causes space in the middle of last year, we've been waiting for the time when we could start applying our data to hot political races. So we were excited this year when we got the chance to take a look at Newt Gingrich for the Huffington Post and then at Rick Santorum for the blog Big Think. We co-authored the pieces with some key thinkers at the Center for American Progress.

We think our findings look interesting and are proving our as the primary campaign season stretches on. Newt Gingrich looks strong on based on top level social networking data. But when we dug in, there was a lot of volatility and only so-so mutual engagement between Gingrich's fans and key Republican groups.

The big news was how few of his followers were even based in the US. His roller coaster ride through the primaries was predictable.

"Gingrich enjoyed a terrific November and December, according to the pollsters. That said, virtually every piece of evidence in the social networking space indicates that Gingrich's head of steam is bound to evaporate - indeed it may already have. His support in the social sphere is thin and anemic. And when the going really gets tough in Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina, his base, such as it is, looks to be unreliable and dispassionate. Neither Mitt Romney nor Ron Paul have this problem, and therefore both have real staying power."

Read the full Huffington Post article here.

Rick Santorum was a different story. There we saw low numbers but strength and mutual affinity among key groups. All likely to make Santorum a very credible banner carrier for a core portion of Republican primary voters.

"[W]e found that Santorum is positioned to solidify support in the South, to siphon the buzz from many of his rivals, and to build his base among socially conservative voters. Indeed, he already made one big move last weekend when he garnered major endorsements from evangelical leaders. But fair warning: he's merely positioned to make a move. At the end of the day, his ability to do so will turn on time and money, both things he's relatively short on."

Read the full Big Think post here.

Colligent Goes Political!

Colligent is already proving in the marketplace the power of understanding and leveraging strong mutual engagement between two entities. But we are taking it one step further by using our aggregated social media data to help politicians and issue-based organizations understand where the real emotional engagement is among the voting public.

Victoria Bassetti, crack researcher, political junkie, and a key member of the Colligent team, has pulled together an incredibly insightful and absorbing analysis of how social media fans and followers are engaged with politics and politicians. A must read for anyone interested in better understanding where the real connections are in this space and the strength of these engagements.

For example, Obama far and away has the most fans and followers. But today, Romney has a much higher percentage of intensely engaged fans and followers. Can he maintain that advantage? House of Representative members just haven't been able to establish large groups of fans and followers in the social media networks. Are they missing a big opportunity? And Newt Gingrich may have a lot of fans and followers, but on closer look, they may not be worth very much to him when it comes to election time. Does his team understand this?

Music and music artists are a great source of insight into where politicians and issue based organizations can find fans and in turn, reach them. Would many folks guess that P Diddy has some of the most politically engaged fans...more than even the often mentioned and politically involved Bruce Springsteen?

These little nuggets are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how Colligent's data will be a wealth of information and guidance to any politician, candidate for office, or issue-based organization looking to reach and influence prospective voters in the upcoming 2012 election year.

Look for more insights from Victoria in the weeks and months ahead and read her analysis at http://colligent.com/politics-fall2011.pdf

Announcing MeQ (PageRank for Social Affinities)

The mutual engagement chart launched today, incorporates our MeQ (Mutual Engagement Quotient) based ranking, which we believe is revolutionary. Just as Google's PageRank revolutionized search relevance by leveraging the key principle of referral links to the content, we believe MeQ will revolutionize social affinity (likes, follows, friends, etc.) relevance by looking for reciprocal affinity to a brand. In other words, it's not enough for a large number of your fans to like Ashton Kutcher, it's equally important for enough of Ashton fans to like you back, to rank higher in our system. Thus you need mutual love to make the affinity relevant. This surprisingly simple principle leads to high quality affinities. To paraphrase John Lennon, "All you need is (mutual) love", to find meaning in the noisy world of social affinities.
The official press release is here.

Public Mutual Engagement Charts

We just went public with our mutual engagement charts on the home page. It provides top 10 affinities for any brand of your choosing. Try it out at our home page, if you havn't done so already. Feel free to embed the chart for any brand at your own web site or pass it on to your friend thru email or sharing (click the "Embed this chart" link on the chart).

Mention of Colligent in Radio-Info.com

I & Marc Ratner had a good chat recently with Sean Ross and Tom Webster at Edison Research. Sean writes a Programming & Music column that gets published at Radio-Info.com. His most recent article talks about the alternative station choices for listeners who were used to listening to a classic rock station in New York market (WRXP) which was recently sold. Per our data below, WDHA, WRAT, and WAXQ were the alternate choices for them. This is based on the mutual affinities of WRXP fans. Thanks to Shawn for including our insights into his column.

"Mutual Love" - Why It's Important

We at Colligent spend a lot of time thinking about "mutual love," which we define as the reciprocal engagement and affinity between the common social media fans of two different entities. It could be between the common fans of two brands, a brand and a TV show, a brand and a celebrity, or other important combinations.

Why is this important? Consumers have relationships with and affinities for thousands of different entities such as brands, media and entertainment entities, sports, and celebrities just to name a few. So identifying and understanding which of these relationships are the strongest provides marketers with extraordinary insight and guidance on where to look for new opportunities that can deliver incremental business. Finding where these levels of engagement are strongest can mean the difference between a run of the mill idea and a potential home run.

Our goal is to establish the measurement of this "mutual love" as an industry standard for any brand owner who wants to answer the fundamental question: "How can I use social media data to help identify the next set of big ideas for driving my business ahead?"

Stay tuned.

Mention of Colligent by @shivsingh at PepsiCo

Thanks to Shiv for including us in his presentation at Conversational Marketing Summit on Jun 6, 2011. We are gratified with his endorsement that ours is the "type of new research that can't be found anywhere else". See about 12:30 in the video here.