Romney Campaign Buys Sponsored Hashtag #AreYouBetterOff..But It Backfires

[Ryan]

http://www.buzzfeed.com/tommywilhelm/how-romney-learned-the-hard-truth-about-promoted-h

After betting big on Twitter ads, the Romney campaign just saw their first sponsored hashtag go wrong. After promoting #AreYouBetterOff to the top of Twitter's list of trending hashtags as a criticism of President Obama's economic policies, a surprising number of tweets came in saying, Yes, they are better off.

But exactly how many tweets were defending President Obama? By our calculations, it's a Mockery Ratio of nearly 5:1.

Most talk about the economy is negative (also, it seems, about politics in general), so sentiment analysis doesn't quite work on #AreYouBetterOff. Instead, I searched the Twitter analytic tool Topsy for simple "yes" and "no" answers. There might be some false positives in there, but even as a rough analysis, the numbers weren't encouraging. Over the two days of the DNC (when the hashtag was promoted), Topsy clocked 5,637 "yes" tweets, compared with just 1,121 "no" tweets, for a general ratio of 5:1.

Thanks to Twitter's overdeveloped instinct for mockery, this is a fairly common tale. In fact, in the early days of Twitter advertising, it was so common that it even earned an insufferably jargony name: a bashtag. McDonalds and Disney are just two of the companies that have seen their promoted hashtags used against them. But when you crunch the numbers, Romney's stacks up as one of the worst bashtags Twitter's seen.

 

[sandorski]

lol

 

[monovillage]

How many of Obama's twitter followers were fake again? Wasn't it 70%? but somehow this bullshit matters?

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-13-million-fake-twitter-followers-report-104823372.html

It's more a story of who gets paid to be a whiny little bitch on twitter.

 

[Atomic Playboy]

How many of Obama's twitter followers were fake again? Wasn't it 70%? but somehow this bullshit matters?

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-13-million-fake-twitter-followers-report-104823372.html

It's more a story of who gets paid to be a whiny little bitch on twitter.

So ignoring the fakes, Barack Obama has nearly 10 times as many followers as Mitt Romney? Well that sure changes my opinion of the candidates!

 

[Schmide]

How many of Obama's twitter followers were fake again? Wasn't it 70%? but somehow this bullshit matters?

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-13-million-fake-twitter-followers-report-104823372.html

It's more a story of who gets paid to be a whiny little bitch on twitter.

Any mathematician will tell you their sampling methods are flawed.

StatusPeople bases their "Fake Follower Check" numbers on a sample of 1,000 followers from an account's most recent 100,000 followers. The followers are assessed on a number of criteria to see if they are spam accounts. StatusPeople says that on a basic level spam accounts "tend to have few or no followers and few or no tweets. But in contrast they tend to follow a lot of other accounts."

A random sample must be random. If you pre-bias your sample by any criteria (date!), it is no longer valid. Even worse when you apply those pre-biased sample to the whole sample you excluded, you have compounded the error tremendously.

Edit: A good example of why you can't limit a sample by date/time. The guests of a party were sampled on whether they were late to the party by sampling the last 20 people to the party.

 

[monovillage]

So ignoring the fakes, Barack Obama has nearly 10 times as many followers as Mitt Romney? Well that sure changes my opinion of the candidates!

It could be that people that follow Obama are fucked up losers with time on their hands. While people that follow Romney are usually working and making a living.

 

[nageov3t]

why does anyone give a shit about twitter?

whether it's Romney investing ad money into it or the media reporting on it, it seems retarded all around.

 

[DominionSeraph]

How many of Obama's twitter followers were fake again? Wasn't it 70%? but somehow this bullshit matters?

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-13-million-fake-twitter-followers-report-104823372.html

And once again a conservatard falls flat for something spun on the most tenuous basis. Their method is basically a guess based on an untested and untestable assumption, and by their own admission may be overridden by other factors in cases of high popularity:

http://fakers.statuspeople.com/Fakers/FindOutMore/

How accurate is it?
For those of you with 100,000 followers or less we believe our tool will provide a very accurate insight into how many inactive and fake followers you have.

If you're very, very 'popular' the tool will still provide good insight but may better reflect your current follower activity rather than your whole follower base.

So apparently Obama's Twitter followers aren't of the type that tweets their every bowel movement. And you think this is a point against him?

And I do so love this reader comment:

Keyser Soze • 12 days ago
Sad that these small one off oufits seems to do a better job of investigative journalism that any of the major outlets

Sad that someone thinks that shoving data through a program making baseless claims and then reporting what it shits out counts as "investigative."

 

[EagleKeeper]

You would also expect that Obama followers are the ones that will pay the most attention to his statements.

Just like Romney followers will pay attention to his statements.

Preaching to the choir just gives one a warm fuzzy.
The proof is in the donations box as to the quality of the sermon.

 

[her209]

It could be that people that follow Obama are fucked up losers with time on their hands. While people that follow Romney are usually working and making a living.

Nope. The people who follow Obama are more techno savvy while the Romney supporters need to be explained what double-clicking means. That's assuming they can't get "series the tubes" where they live in the sticks.

 

[jhbball]

It could be that people that follow Obama are fucked up losers with time on their hands. While people that follow Romney are usually working and making a living.

all these hard-working republicans posting on the internet all day. I'm shocked.

 

[Paul98]

Seriously... what the hell did they expect?