Travis Vocino Experiments in Art, Science & Technology.

In answering a question on LinkedIn today, I started thinking about PR campaigns on Twitter — specifically the presidential candidates. Also, how this relates to utilizing social and viral marketing as a whole.

Two case studies for utilizing Twitter for PR campaigns: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Both campaigns have fairly active twitter posters who put up similar kinds of tweets — basically they post “I’m at [this location] today and tomorrow I’ll be at [this location].” Boring.

However, despite the similarly mundane content, the differences in subscriber numbers are pretty large. Hillary has 3,463 followers compared to Barack’s 26,669. These numbers represent people that are willing to have their personal twitter spaces invaded by what is essentially PR spam from their chosen candidate.

Techies Stick Together

Barack did join Twitter first (April 29, 2007), with Hillary joining the tweeting late (January 13, 2008). Hillary caught up and posted more entries (131 vs. 108). I don’t think these statistics are enough to contribute to the large gap in the numbers though.

In my opinion, the differences start with simply the demographic. If you have a largely young and active-in-tech demographic that you’re wanting to market to, they will likely embrace your more advanced campaigns. I think this is evidenced by the differences between Obama’s and Clinton’s demographics and how the technologies they’ve utilized have been received — techies stick together.

Once you have this audience, you have to do 2 very important things: Keep them and make them do shit for you.

Listen to ME!

Another major difference in the candidate Twitter accounts you’ll notice is that the Clinton campaign doesn’t follow anyone back while Barack follows everyone. She has zero (0) followings compared to Obama’s 26,953. Bottom line is whoever is running her Twitter account is an idiot. There is something to be said for reciprocation.

When spamming PR to people, they want to at least feel like there’s hope of a 2-way dialogue — rather than just getting spoon fed. This aspect is very important in today’s social/viral PR campaigns. If you lose that edge, you lose that audience. In any viral campaign, from LonelyGirl to Presidential Tweets, you have at least give the illusion that you care what people have to say and that you have established the needed infrastructure to facilitate that (e.g. a Twitter account where you follow people!).

Added Viral Benefit

And that’s not all! Clinton is really missing the boat by not reciprocating her supporters’ follows.

Why? Because her Twitter page offers me nothing except for information I can get on her site regarding her whereabouts. If I really needed this data, I could get it anywhere — even in other syndicated feeds like her site’s RSS. Both candidates say post the same nonsense.

In our world (the nerd), the real endorsements come from our peers. When I go to Obama’s Twitter page, he shows me pages upon pages of people who he has followed. I can easily check to see who supports him.

When I check the list and see that some of my best internet buddies, tons of celebrity A-List bloggers, high profile open-source project contributors and me (duh) are among the followers, that may even be more valuable for this demographic than the Kennedy endorsement. These are people that care about issues that Barack has spoken about — like Net Neutrality.

That’s golden information for us early technology adopters.