May 25 2008
Hillary vs. Obama Social Media
I’m pro-Hillary and anti-Obama. I’m anti-Obama to the point that I’ll vote McCain if the choices are Obama and McCain. Those feelings aside, I stumbled upon something very interesting today. It’s been said many times by the media (who have a crush on Obama) that he’s done a great job mobilizing the young and well educated. It doesn’t take a genius to know that today’s youth and the well educated are online big time.
I was checking out the Twitter profiles for Hillary and Obama today. Something really jumped out at me that showed with crystal clarity the difference between how they’ve approached those two targets. As of today, Hillary has 4,019 followers and Obama has 33,069 followers. That in its own right says a lot, but that’s not the big stat.
The big stat is that Obama is following 33,960 people and Hillary is following 0. Literally 0. That’s not an “o” that’s a ZERO. As we look at engaging people and carrying on the conversation, how can you possibly do that if you are following no one? Think about it. For each person you follow, you can engage them at almost a 1 to 1 level. Those people have followers who can see the conversation taking place and might just end up following Hillary directly.
To me, this sums up the problem with Hillary’s campaign.
I wrote about what you just wrote about, along a bit expanded, right here:
http://marketingconversation.com/2008/04/20/telling-numbers-on-internet-marketing-spend-on-the-obama-and-clinton-campaigns/
I think the stats that you and I found portrays an excellent example of one of the reasons why Hillary lost. Another example is that her campaign only allowed positive comments on her YouTube videos. Better to not allow any to prevent vile attacks then have a tightly controlled mechanism over a conversation.