NPR writes: Facebook Could Be Powerful Tool In Targeting Voters
This story explains the power of social media users to influence voters in their networks to vote. The research published in Nature magazine reinforces the strategy developed by Brand Builder Communications to achieve 70% voter support for a half billion dollars in tax funding for the Summit County DD board last November.
One of the key findings, that we knew at the time, was that people no longer respond to corporate messages – they respond to thought leaders in their networks. NPR correspondent Shankar Vedantam, who reports on social science research, explained what the researchers found about how a election related social media strategy works, “So every time you get a message on Facebook from the Obama or Romney campaigns, or every time you get a tweet from them, saying please like this message or please retweet this, what they’re doing is taking advantage of the fact that when you amplify a message from the campaign, it’s much more effective than the campaign sending out messages directly.” This is exactly how we engaged voters during the levy campaign and it worked like crazy – garnering more voter support than any other county-wide levy ever had.
Here is another NPR spot about the study in Nature and how they watched how Facebook users responded to voting messages in 2010.
Here is another NPR spot about the study in Nature and how they watched how Facebook users responded to voting messages in 2010.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=161014130