Ad Age: Scott Brown beating Martha Coakley on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube
When we woke up this morning, SCOTT BROWN was a trending topic on Twitter. MASSACHUSETTS was a trending topic on Twitter. But MARTHA COAKLEY was not. (That's since changed -- "Coakley" is on the charts, and there's an asterisk involved, since Twitter is counting anything with "Brown" in it as a Scott Brown tweet. Which means if you posted "Charlie Brown would've been a better candidate than these morons," it would've counted as a Tweet for Scott.)
Granted, the Brown campaign has generated more partisan interest nationally -- especially from the Tea Party set -- so Twitter ends up being an indicator of limited utility. But AD AGE runs down the numbers on the candidates' respective social-media campaigns, and reports that Coakley is getting killed on the internet.
The latest polls
were giving Republican state Sen. Scott Brown an edge over the
Massachusetts attorney general on the eve of the election, but online,
there's really no contest: It's all Brown all the time.
It's not yet clear how visibility in social media translates to
votes (even Mr. Obama's camp credited e-mail and direct marketing as
the most effective online tactic), but Mr. Brown has been aggressive on
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, while Ms. Coakley has been, well,
nowhere. On Twitter, @scottbrownMA has 10,765 followers vs.
@MarthaCoakley with 3,657; on Facebook, it's 83,535 friends to 15,573;
and on YouTube, Mr. Brown has a souped-up channel with 675,208 views,
while videos posted by the Coakley campaign have been viewed 76,805
times.
The bottom line? In Ad Age's summary, the lessons learned by the Obama campaign "appear to have been lost" on Coakley. Let's just hope that Democrats were too busy organizing GOTV campaigns to be posting 140-character updates.
Silver lining? Not much, but if you believe -- as we do -- that Martha's gonna pull this one out by the skin of her teeth, there's still time to profit. According to INTRADE, the online predictions engine that turns any question into a stock market, the market predicts there is a 71-percent chance that Scott Brown will win today's election. If you want to put your money where your mouth is, go here.