Distinguished Visitor Series - #Fail: The Misuse of Social Media in the 2012 US Presidential Campaign
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Speaker: Jonathan Chavez, Director of Analytics at SocialSphere
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Date: Tuesday 15 May 2012 from 6.30 - 7.45pm
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Venue:Davis Theatre, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin
As part of the Distinguished Visitor Seminar Series Jonathan Chavez, Director of Analytics at SocialSphere an insight-based strategy company, delivered a talk titled #Fail: The Misuse of Social Media in the 2012 US Presidential Campaign. Jonathan is visiting Ireland as part of a US Department of State funded program run through the Boston College Irish Institute.
Presentation Overview
Ever since President Barack Obama won the US Presidency in 2008, campaigns and organizations throughout the public and private sector have invested significant resources into social media engagement and marketing. Unfortunately, many prominent campaigns have fundamentally failed to make proper use of social media, and results of these failures have had significant impacts on the current presidential campaign. In particular, many Republican campaigns have made significant investments into social media strategy, but by not truly understanding the nature of social media, and the use environments where it can be effective, they failed to translate their technological know how into votes, donations, and success. Only by understanding the mentality and analytics behind social media can campaigns and organizations harness its power.
This discussion focuses on the development of social media in politics beginning in 2000 and going through the present, and discusses how changes in the nature of social media over that time have shifted the way that campaigns need to think about budgets and strategies. Case studies for 2012 will include the Romney, Santorum, Perry, Paul, and Gingrich campaigns, and implications for campaigns outside the United States will also be discussed.
Podcast
Presentation
Speaker Biography
In Jonathan's position as Director of Analytics, his focus is turning numbers and data into action and strategy. Because many of SocialSphere’s client engagements involve multi-faceted, multi-discipline approaches to analytics, Jonathan’s expertise and methodological focus range from various forms of online analytics to traditional market research. In bringing these disciplines together, Jonathan has produced a number of innovative research techniques and products that SocialSphere uses to give clients an analytics edge.
Jonathan utilizes a number of tools ranging from ethnographic research, media content analysis, market research techniques, web analytics, Internet content monitoring and financial modeling to create comprehensive views of organizations and their stakeholders. Jonathan is intimately familiar with most web analytics and social media tracking platforms, and uses that familiarity to customize the approaches for each client engagement.
While at SocialSphere, Jonathan has led the development of SocialSphere’s ORBIT Methodology, and has played a leading role in SocialSphere’s engagements with the United States Marine Corps, the Thoroughbred racing industry, and its education work, and has played a role in SocialSphere’s work with Harvard’s Institute of Politics.
Jonathan is a graduate of Harvard College, with a degree in Social Studies. As an undergraduate, his work focused on nationalism and group formation theory in Western democracies and in survey research methods and statistics.