Is Romney ahead of the President on Twitter? Do Elephants Fly?

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At a closed door fundraising meeting Sunday (4/14), Mitt Romney is reported to have said:

“We are behind when it comes to commentators on TV. They tend to be liberal. Where we are ahead or even is on twitter and on the Internet.”

Is he? That’s an interesting question for several reasons.  First, there’s no single definition of ahead or behind.  Second, because any real metric is a bit hard to calculate.  Third,  Twitter is a fairly volatile place, and so picking the timeframe might influence things one way or another.

Let’s work through these issues and look at what the statistics show us.  Maybe we’ll come to an answer — or maybe we’ll decide it’s too hard to answer a simple question!

First: What is the right definition of ahead?

One definition of “ahead” is a sort of gestalt kind of thing: it does seems like Mitt just had a good twitter week.  That’s not an unreasonable way of looking at things, but it’s also not really something you can prove.  I’m sure Mitt is happy about the recent conflict between Ann Romney and Hilary Rosen. Mrs. Romney got a lot of press and a lot of tweets that may have turned the tide for a while in the war on women debate.  However, taking advantage of your opponent’s gaffs is not really a strategy (unless your opponent is predictably gaff-prone).  A few weeks from now, this will have faded away and be replaced by some other outrage.  We might assume a pro-Romney shift in Twitter, but it could fade.

Another definition of “ahead” might be # of followers.  I’ve seen this mentioned a few times by others.  The problem is it doesn’t really delve into why people are following you.  They may love you and hang on every word.  They may hate you and are looking for you to slip up so they can pounce on it.  I think the combativeness of political discourse means that # of followers is a very tough metric to draw conclusions from; you’re just not going to know a lot about why people are following you.  If Mitt was Tide Soap, followers would probably be a great metric.

You might say you’re ahead based upon the number of tweets you make.  This might be a great metric of how active your social media team is, but is probably not a great metric of how effective you are.  It’s an input to the process, not an output. Again, this is at best a tie breaker.

One definition of “ahead” I think is meaningful is how often you get mentioned in tweets.  It’s not perfect, because if you say or do something that animates your opposition, you’re going to trigger a bunch of tweets even though they are not supporters.  But, over time, the number of mentions is at least  a valid indicator of mindshare.

Another useful definition of “ahead” is how often you get retweeted.  Unfortunately, this is not a great standalone metric — if you are not a heavy tweeter or your tweets are not particularly retweetable, you won’t score well even if you are the darling of the media.

A combination of the last two is useful, though, to see how much of the twitter conversation you dominate.  And it’s what we can go on — it’s hard to draw any other metrics out of Twitter.

So let’s start the scoring!

We’re looking at the accounts @MittRomney, which is the official campaign account for Mitt Romney, and @BarackObama, which is the official campaign account for Barack Obama.  We’re also looking at tweets taged with #Mitt2012 or #Obama2012

Followers:

  • Mitt Romney: 442,029
  • Barack Obama: 14,275,493

I did say that followers are not a great metric, but you’d have to admit that Obama is way ahead here. You might give Obama an advantage since he joined Twitter in March 2007 and Mitt Romney joined June 2009.  But that’s not much of a difference, although I suspect that Romney only really got active once he announced his campaign which didn’t help.  Still, if you were going by followers, Romney is way behind.

How about by the # of tweets since the start of the year?

  • Mitt Romney: 180
  • Barack Obama: 1063

Barack Obama sends out about 6 times as many tweets as Mitt Romney does.  While I did say that the # of tweets is not an indicator, in itself, of your presence on Twitter, the comparatively fewer tweets from Romney probably trickles down into the statistics which follow:

In terms of mentions — the number of tweets by people that include either @barackobama or #obama2012 for Obama or @mittromney or @mitt2012 for Romney:

  • Mitt Romney: 60,502
  • Barack Obama: 138,881

The President is ahead by a bit over 2 to 1 here.  That’s actually an impressive showing by Romney, given his light tweeting.  But it is still a 2+ to 1 advantages to the President.

In terms of retweets, where somebody has been so moved by what the candidate says that they repeat it to their followers:

  • Mitt Romney 10,006
  • Barack Obama: 34,288

Here the President is 3+ to 1 over Romney.

Even Klout has the President with a higher score than Romney.

Net net (wow, you read this far?):

Romney is way behind on Twitter, his one good week with the Ann vs. Hilary battle notwithstanding.  If he thinks that, he needs to have a metrics based discussion with his social media team. Any viable metric you come up with is going to show him at best 2 to 1 behind and probably far worse.

Notes:

For the count of # of tweets sent by the candidate, I looked at their tweets between 1/1/2012 and 4/14/2012, inclusive.  For the other metrics, I looked at all tweets sent between 2012-04-10 01:00:29 and 2012-04-16 17:00:35 EDT, a few hours short of a full week’s worth.

“Mack campaign loses luster,” says Miami Herald. They just made that up, says I

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The Miami Herald has an article today saying that Connie Mack IV’s campaign is fizzling out.  As evidence of this, they quote a few party insiders (many unnamed) and look at some very early fundraising reports.

When I look at what’s happening on Twitter, though, I call bullshit.

Let’s start with how much each of the candidates has tweeted lately:

Click on image to enlarge

What we see is that McCalister is still not very active (we last looked at the three of them about three weeks ago), but LeMieux and Mack are fairly comparable in their activity.

So, how does the Twitterverse respond to them?

Click on Image to Enlarge

Well, maybe if Connie Mack’s wife Mary was running for Senate in Florida we could call it a lackluster campaign, since her mentions are between LeMieux’s and McCalister’s.  But since it’s the Mr. and not the Mrs. who’s running, we can see that on Twitter the Mack Attack is dominating the rest of them.

Maybe the Miami Herald should escape the Brie and Chablis set and find out what’s really happening.  Because compared to his two opponents, Connie Mack is on fire.

Methodology & Notes:

Some important things to remember:

  1. I retrieved all tweets sent by the three candidates since 1/1/2012 to get a general level of their twitter activity.
  2. I retrieved all tweets sent by others in the past week that mentioned @ConnieMackIV, @RepConnieMack, @George_LeMieux, or @McCalister4FL.  Including RepConnieMack in the list had almost no effect on the results.
  3. Because of #2, Bill Nelson, Mary Bono Mack, and Mitt Romney were only counted in tweets that also included at least one of the candidates. In other words, I did not go looking for these folks, they just showed up when our three GOP contenders were discussed.
  4. Twitter popularity is not a scientific poll.  But I bet it’s a lot more accurate than asking a few grumpy insiders what they think!
  5. Just in case all the tweets about Connie were “hey, he’s losing his luster”, I read through them all.  Virtually all of his mentions were supporters.

Hilary Rosen gets a Lesson in Social Media from Ann Romney

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You got to hand it to @AnnDRomney — she played Hilary Rosen masterfully with her use of social media.  At 10:17 pm EDT, she had not made a single tweet.  Then at 10:18, she wrote:

And then all heck broke loose.  Here’s a chart of the number of tweets that talked about Ann over the next 24 hours:

Click to enlarge chart

A huge spike over 3000 tweets per hour during the 11pm (EDT) hour of the day, only settling down around 2am before staring to climb back up again around 8am, making it back to over 2500 TPH by mid morning.

And what was everyone talking about? Here’s a list of the most frequently appearing words in those tweets:

Click on image to see larger version

You wouldn’t have to guess too hard what the topic was.  Of course, almost 10% of the tweets were a re-tweet of Ann’s first message.  Talk about Klout!

There weren’t any distinctive pattern of hash tags, and the people most mentioned in the tweets are the obvious ones — Hilary Rosen was mentioned in over 20% of the Tweets.

Of course Hilary got an amazing boost of popularity/notoriety as well:

Click on image to enlarge

Interestingly, there were just about as many tweets mentioning @hilaryr as @anndromney, even though each only appeared in about 20% of the tweets mentioning the other.

I don’t want to weigh in on the controversy, but I will say this.  From never having tweeted before, Ann Romney has done incredibly well to shape and define the debate using Twitter.  I saw both of them on TV yesterday, and Ann looked poised and in control while Hilary looked like the kid who was being dragged to the neighbor’s house to apologize for TPing the yard. My advice to Hilary: It’s good you said you’re sorry but stop trying to rephrase what you said in a way that you think will pass muster.  It just looks like you’re only sorry you got caught.

Personal bias disclaimer: I thought Hilary was trying to destroy the internet in the 90s by leading the RIAA in attacking everything that might pose a risk to the music industry. Schadenfreude ist die schönste Freude.

Criminals Target Innocent Pinterest Users Based Upon What They Like To Pin

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Pinterest has taken off like wildfire, reportedly reaching 10 million unique visitors faster than any other website.  And on the surface, Pinterest is a blissfully spam free environment.  Just lovely pictures.

(See the List of Suspicious Pinterest URLs that spam sites use for the latest)

Nonetheless, the spammers have moved into Pinterest big time.  And users are starting to notice.

The first generation of spam involves the spammer posting hundreds of items that go to a spammer’s page which offers an item for sale.  When the user clicks to order, it takes them to Amazon for purchase, and the spammer picks up an affiliate payment for bringing the buyer in.  This kind of spam has gotten a lot of attention lately.

But there’s novel approach that targets people based upon what they pin.

Let’s say you pin a Gucci purse to your board.   You are inadvertently advertising yourself as someone who owns or aspires to own a Gucci purse.  And the criminals notice this.

All of a sudden, you pick up a follower like this:

That looks pretty innocent (although Tandy doesn’t say a lot about herself — that’s a tip off).  So you think, those star things look good, what are they?  You click on the picture and see:

Still not a lot of information.  But there’s a clue — I’ve added the red arrow pointing to the tip off that something’s amiss with the page.  The URL pinleresl.com is clearly meant to look like pinterest.com.

And so you click the image and are led to a page like this:

They want to sell you fake Guccis. This is illegal.

A page full of fake Guccis for sale.  Why? Because you like luxury purses, and this is targeted to you.

Sometimes the page leads to something that fakes not just the products, but Pinterest’s sponsorship as well:

Click on Image to Enlarge and See the Fake URL

It looks like Pinterest is sponsoring a give-away of L’oreal products — but of course it is not.  What is more likely is either that (a) it will try to pry enough personal information out of you to steal your identity or (b) it will try to convince you to install some sort of malware (I played along with one long enough to discover it wanted to install a tool bar in Google Chrome for me), or (c) all of the above.  This kind of stuff is bad news if you fall for it.

All the usual scams are out there on Pinterest — phishing, fake contests,  malware.  Everything on the Internet that is bad is just one click away.

Again, the worrying thing about this is that the spammers aren’t just passively posting catalogs of products they want to sell like has been observed before.  They are actively looking for users who express interests in certain brands or products, and targeting with focused content for knock-offs or phishing. You are being targeted by what you pin on Pinterest.  This makes it much more likely that you’ll fall for the scam when it is about something you’re interested in.

There are many other examples like this with fictitious Pinterest users whose pins all lead to bad things.  Probably nobody knows how much of this is going on, but it is a problem that the brand owners and Pinterest are going to have to grapple with.  The availability of spam-bots makes this sort of thing quick and easy to set up.

My wife (the active pinner of the two of us) first alerted me to this problem, and so I sat down and ran through all her followers. I discovered that 50% of her followers are spammers/phishers/pirates.  And she’s not unusual.  I looked at several of her (real) Pinterest friends and found pretty much that everybody was starting to attract a large collection of spam followers.

What’s especially pernicious is that unknowing Pinterest users are re-pinning spam.  Let’s say you see a photo on Pinterest you like.  If you don’t click through it, you don’t know where it goes.  And so when you re-pin it, all your followers will see it — and if your friends click through (maybe just because you re-pinned it?), they could be infected with a virus because of your repin.  Is it your fault? No, you’re a victim too.  But it’s insidious how this can spread from user to user like … a virus.

How do you detect it these spammers? Right now, there’s a couple things I see …

  • The spammers have lots of boards, but only one pin per board:
    Click to enlarge
    You might have a couple boards with one pin, but every single board with one pin?  Not real typical for a Pinterest user.  And the description of a lot of these folks is blank.  Just a name.  So if the user looks unusual — lots of boards, but about the same number of pins as boards — it’s a reason to be suspicious.
  • The URLs don’t go to a real web site, they go to a URL shortener like bit.ly or goo.gl:

    Not all of these people do this, but if you see a link shortener being used it’s a bright red flag.  There’s a fair number of link shorteners out there, but if the web site doesn’t look real to you, it’s worth thinking about.  As a note, Pinterest should disallow the use of link shorters like this that hide what the real web site is.
  • The URL is trying to fool you by looking like a real site, but is just trying to confuse you — see the second picture in this blog post for the “pinleresl.com” example.
  • You click through and see something like this:

Google says “Stay away!”

You know that’s bad news.

  • You see some sort of spoof or phishing site like:

It looks official and real, but it’s totally fake and totally going to rip you off if you “Participate Now”.  Again, the URL is the big give-away.

Unfortunately, the problem with giving any specific advice is that the spammers are going to adapt quickly to any patterns we detect.  So your best protection is to be wary, know that not everything is as it seems, and if it doesn’t pass the sniff test, get out.  If I notice changes in their behavior, I’ll post updates as time goes on.  You can follow me on Twitter (socialseercom), sign up for this web site (there’s a link somewhere around here to get notifications of updates), or just check in now and then.

Caveat Pinner — and pass this along to anyone you know who uses Pinterest.

Further reading:

Globe & Mail: Social networking site Pinterest in battle against spammers

Time: Pinterest Easiest Site to Spam Says Man Making $1,000 a Day Doing It