Patrick Gladney

Social media marketing and elections.  A match truly made in heaven.  The candidates are both human and brand, and need to quickly activate their target customer base to buy at a one day sale.  Retail politics has been supplanted by influencer marketing.  Handshakes and baby kissing have been overtaken by retweets, likes and views.  Campaign communication managers must now contend with spin, counter-spin and social spin.

While the impact of social media on Canada’s “Twitter Election” is widely debated and quite possibly overstated, how well are the primary prime ministerial candidates using the social web to speak to the electorate?  We looked at each of their online properties and graded their efforts.  What we found is that all of the candidates have integrated technology to reach their audience, but few are genuinely participating in social media to truly engage with Canadians.

Stephen Harper, Conservative Party – B minus...

Below is a synopsis of my talk sitting on a panel at Joseph Thornley’s well organized and attended Third Tuesday Measurement Matters conference in Toronto:

I think that there are a number of things that social media does pretty well, including promote advocacy, provide customer support and inspire innovation, but the metrics are still too fuzzy and not closely connected enough to business performance to substantiate increased investment.  Too often social media measurement results in information that’s “nice to know” rather than “need to have”.

Don’t get me wrong, I think there is still merit in measuring social media against each of these objectives, but until business can draw a straighter line between social media and ROI, specifically in the form of sales and profit, social media will remain a small line item on the marketing budget.  There are three lines that matter in business, top,...

Apple.  The Wall Street darling, design-led thinking, we’ve got a larger market capitalization than Microsoft, Apple.  The company that formerly encouraged us to Think Different, Apple.  The company that’s no longer a computer manufacturer, but an entertainment brand, Apple.   The company that can seemingly do no wrong, Apple. Until now, that is.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock with no 3G or wi-fi access, you’ve probably heard about the iphone 4’s recent antennae woes.  Getting your hands on a new iphone 4 is a challenge, which probably has more to do with Apple working to resolve this issue than the insatiable demand that characterizes most things they sell.  And while I am confident in their ability to rectify this technical issue, I wanted to comment on why the advertising for iphone 4 misses the mark, strategically.

The majority of Apple’s creative messaging for the iphone...

In October 2010 Toronto will be electing a new mayor.  As the campaign heats up, so too does the conversations in social media. And because Toronto is one of the most engaged and active social media cities in the world, we can safely assume that social media  will play an increasingly prominent  role in the campaign leading up to the election.

Listening to and analyzing these discussions offers some amazing insights into the election.  It offers a perspective of who’s winning the “word of mouth war”, how the electorate feels about the major candidates and what issues stimulate discussion.

Looking at blogs, Twitter, message boards and other forms of social media, Northstar Social Currency performed an analysis of the online discussions mentioning any of the top six candidates during the past six weeks.  We measured the volume and sentiment of the discussion in addition to detailed content analysis to understand what people...