How Big Data, social media, and analytics will determine the next POTUS – maybe even before election day.
By Camelia.boban (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
Information is the oxygen of the modern age. . . . It seeps through the walls topped with barbed wire. It wafts across the electrified, booby-trapped borders. – Ronald Reagan
Though President Reagan was referring to US/Soviet relations and matters of arms control at the time (hence the remark about barbed wire and electrified borders), that particular statement from 1989 proved eerily prophetic. As true as that comment was back then, it’s exponentially more so, today. Only now intelligence no longer needs to be snatched from the airwaves in bits and pieces or recorded with cumbersome listening devices. Our phones lines, cell towers, and the web of other communication cables blanketing the country heave with unending Bronto Bytes (yes, it’s a thing) of information, making data miners and marketers dizzy with its purity. It’s an embarrassment of information riches for anyone with a message to spread.
And who has a more important message (at least as far as they’re concerned) than Presidential hopefuls in the months leading up to an election? 85% of America is online, and every click of the mouse reveals a little bit more about who each of them is. Be you a single, twenty-something female who drives a Prius and prefers organic or a forty-something man with three children and happily married to his second wife, one click at a time marketers construct a profile of you as a person, or at the very least who you are. That means not only how you’re likely to think, but how you’re likely to vote. But most importantly, whether or not you’re still on the fence about voting at all. Regardless of your political leanings, each candidate will use every scrap of data he or she can piece together to either persuade or solidify a favorable vote. And with every like, share, and retweet you’re revealing clues to help them punch their ticket into the White House.
The biggest of Big Brothers is increasingly helpless against communications technology. – Ronald Reagan
Though from the same speech, President Reagan was off the mark with this one. As it turns out, a quarter century of communications technology innovations made Big Brother bigger and stronger than ever. He knows where you live, your marital and family status, all your credit card numbers and banking information, where you shop, when you shop, what you’re shopping for, whether or not you actually end up buying something, how much you spent, and how you paid for it. He knows your likes and dislikes, your opinions on a wide array of subjects, and even has a decent idea about how you’ll feel about a particular situation or product – possibly even before you do. For everything Big Brother thought he knew in 1989, he knows so much now he scarcely knows what to do with it all.
For better or worse, among the things he does know how to do with all of this information (and is growing increasingly more efficient at with each passing year) is interpreting that data on the fly and using it to tailor specific messages to individual people. The amount of information now available allows brands (and that includes the Democratic and Republican brands, as well) to now market directly to you rather than randomly at you.
Welcome To Microtargeting
But microtargeting is nothing new. Though both the Republican and Democratic campaigns utilized the technique to great success in 2012, Obama’s team demonstrated a thorough understanding of the process and emerged victorious. In this clip, Obama Campaign Manager Jim Messina discusses how his data team evolved from a single tweet on Election day in 2008 to nearly 200 staffers for the 2012 run.
Once we got models of behavior we could figure out what people were going to do. – Jim Messina, Obama Campaign Manager
For political campaigns, knowing what voters will do – especially before they do it – is invaluable. That’s why polling runs practically non-stop during the run-up to and throughout the day of an election. By using data analytics, campaigns don’t even have to ask you a single question to figure out who you will likely vote for – it’s already there in the car you drive, the products you purchase, and your social media posts.
As a result, if you already know someone is voting for your candidate you can focus your efforts elsewhere, like local thought leaders both in the neighborhood and on social media. Endorsements from local newspapers or community leaders have long been cherished for the political capital they can wield and social media can hold just as much sway over people as the outgoing mayor might. Targeting social media thought leaders for their influence is simply a modern-day extension of grassroots, boots-on-the-ground mobilization.
Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis once said, “The secret to business is to know something that nobody else knows.” Your tendencies, actions, and habits, both online and off, reflect who you are and how you think. That level of personal information, as benign as you think watching a particular television show or buying one type of vehicle as opposed to another may be, becomes the DNA with which marketers segment and target you. With the same surgical precision corporate advertisers use collected data to connect with you on some level, be it practical or emotional, political campaigns continue to hone that scalpel’s edge. The issues you care most passionately about, the ones you rant, rave, and possibly even get into arguments over on Twitter or Facebook reveal everything about you that a campaign wants to know (and probably then some). Same goes for those memes, tweets, videos you share.
If you’re a dyed-in-the-red-wool conservative or a blue-to-the-bone liberal you can expect a certain, but relatively limited, amount of political advertising to show up in your mailbox and on your computer screen. But if you’re decidedly undecided? Prepare for a potential tidal wave of messages intended to convince you to vote one way or the other come election day.
Politics in this day and age is undoubtedly a business and with the Oval Office hanging in the balance the stakes are undoubtedly high, but your value as a known entity voter is even higher.
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