Super Tuesday Social Media Results: The Voter Engagement Funnel Is Under Construction

Super Tuesday was as exciting as expected! Here is my take on the campaign’s social strategies, which builds off a piece I did yesterday for Portada and a MocoSpace Community Voter Engagement Study Lens released last Friday.

My biggest takeaway from a social-marketing-lessons-learned perspective was on the Democrat side.

Basically, what’s coming out of the Bernie Sanders camp is really interesting from a content perspective. The Bernie team has done an excellent job of using authentic and issues-based content to spark engagement and even get his community to create content for him. It’s an Obama-like movement aka “Yes We Can.” This has led to some messaging and content that really stands out and has helped Bernie Sanders build an engaged community and war chest of more than 40 million in donations just in February.

Here’s a shout out to one of the best Spanish Latino-targeted campaign videos I’ve ever seen aimed at Mexican Americans. It was made by David E Rojas, part of an Austin, Texas collective of artists working to create videos for Bernie:

But as Super Tuesday showed, Bernie Sanders doesn’t seem to have cracked the code on getting votes. One supporter summed it up perfectly, “you need to vote, not just say you are.”

The “We got so many tweets, likes etc. But they bought zero, they didn’t sign up” is something every social marketer struggles with.  Translating social interests and engagement to conversion is hard and often takes some not as exciting, backroom tech and data activities: building up proprietary data on fans, continuous engagement/management of these contacts and giving your organization access to the data they can actually use. Here is a glimpse of what your tech backroom needs to look like nicely summarized by Fast Company who took a look at marketing tech usage by the different campaigns. Hillary Clinton has some clear advantages on the back of the house side and she has clearly been benefiting from the Obama data mining and tech lessons learned.

Yet, I do think Hillary Clinton could use a bit of Bernie magic in the front end of her voter engagement funnel to win in November. Obama was able to build out the entire funnel to close on votes and win. I don’t think either Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton are there yet. The winning strategy will need to utilize both strategies.

Well, that’s all for now. We will be looking at the build-up to March 5 which has 109 delegates at stake. Great analysis and interactive map over at Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight on the delegate counts.

I am sure there will be some interesting social stories to share.