SMI & political campaigns

Traditionally, political strategists and political campaigns use polls, calls and canvassing to determine voter opinion and measure political temperature. Digital listening technology enables them to perform the same type of analysis as these conventional tools, but much faster and with fewer resources, and to examine larger groups of people.

When this analysis is combined with other data sets, such as lists of users’ followers or the deep and cruciform, physiological and linguistic analyses of the content published online and of someone’s behavior, we are talking about the social media intelligence, the technic of emerging artificial and human intelligence, to obtain the most accurate scan of society. The result of this merger is a valuable tool for political candidates and campaigns.

SMI is the art & craft of emerging artificial and human intelligence, to obtain the most accurate scan of society or a social group.

Social media intelligence involves two components that automation has accelerated and scaled up: data acquisition and data analysis. It is that simple.

Collected data is then analysed by using algorithms and human expertise to analyze words, context, linguistic means and styles, and countless other different variables.

What we can use SMI for in a political campaign?

Predicting behavior with SMI

The capacity to predict behavior has implications in numerous areas. Existing research has demonstrated associations between past and predicted behavior in a person’s potential and readiness to hear the specific style of political message.

Social media intelligence tools, like BigBoxData, deeply examine this potential and foresee future behavior of examined social media community.

Furthermore, our past research work on behavior and content showed that users are more receptive to information that is presented from the perspective of their own personality counterparts (i.e. introverts favor messages introduced from an introvert’s person’s point of view). 

If a user’s personality analyses and behavior are done, online (political) marketing can utilize this to customize their message.

Learning about users’ network with SMI

The user’s network says a lot about the user, you just have to read it. While examination does not go into detail (who the members of the particular network are), it looks at the network on a whole. SMI learns what kind of network it is, how mobile and active it is, and on that basis, what kind of user it is within that network. An introvert? An extrovert?

By learning this, we learn a lot about the way the user tends to “operate” on social media. Introverts tend to belong to fewer but larger and denser communities, while extroverts tend to act as bridges between more frequent, smaller, and overlapping communities.

Knowing whether the user is an introvert or extrovert, political marketing can tailor its message to that social trait of the user.

How cool is that?

Measure the effect of the humor used in the campaign with SMI

Social media intelligence tool has repeatedly given us the opportunity to explore and learn how humor is used in different political campaigns, in different countries, or in different societies.

SMI provides us with an experience of the kind of humor that can, to the benefit of the campaigner, provide the desired reaction. and to create a certain political atmosphere.

Thanks to SMI, we know the effects and reactions on humor and media on social media so we examine how antagonistic groups utilize humor, use media, etc.

Examining the influence of astroturfers and political bots

Using a combination of quantitative content analysis and software-assisted close textual analysis, we can examine the use of ‘astroturfing’ by campaigns and other strategic actors, and the prevalence of retweeting ‘bots.’

As only sentiment analysis systems are not enough to understand users on social media, we account for the local contexts and deep content analytics.

Thanks to this, we can identify astroturfing groups, measure their impact and origins, and propose a strategy to minimize their impact or eliminate them altogether.

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An old school public opinion polls are no longer enough. A competitive advantage is needed, which can be gained by using SMI tools. If you need an experienced team with expertise in working with the SMI and producing competitive results for your political campaign, contact us right away.