Trendsetter

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2012-08-27

Are You a Political Insider?

Every four years, America’s political elite gathers for two blowout events known as the party conventions. Delegates and party insiders won’t just be nominating Mitt Romney in Tampa this week — and Barack Obama in Charlotte next week; they’ll be spending the week angling for prized floor credentials and swank party invites.

Insider status will go a long way in Tampa and Charlotte — as it does in DC year round — and we wanted to see if it would be possible to use social data to build a formula to calculate something as nebulous and often elusive as political insider status.

Are You a Political Insider? is a new tool from Trendsetter we built to answer this question. We analyze your interests on Facebook to see how much you have in common with members of D.C.’s political class. We give you a Political Insider Score — from 0 to 100, and let you see how you stack up against America’s most consummate political animals — and all your friends. At least for our friends, the results were shockingly accurate. Here’s how a few of the people I’m connected to on Facebook stack up:

Over the last few months we’ve learned a lot from Trendsetter, a tool that uses analysis of Facebook interest and likes and combines it with simple surveys to discover the hidden psychographic forces that drive public opinion. Our study of the political leanings of major social networking platforms was picked up all over the Internet — including in Mashable, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Huffington Post, and BuzzFeed.

Now, we’re turning the spotlight back on us, and asking what all those likes can say about the things we care about, and about our core identity. First up: Can social data predict something as seemingly opaque as who’s likely to have the ear of decision-makers?

We won’t pretend any ranking algorithm can be 100% accurate. Influence, after all, can be a pretty subjective thing.

Nonetheless, we think this comes pretty darned close. Connect, and see what the world would be like if social media decided backstage access at the convention.
2012-07-10

Mapping the Politics of the Social Web

Like to sell stuff on eBay? You might be a Romney voter — and you’re probably very highly engaged politically. Like xckd and Tumblr? You’re totally in the Obama camp — but a bit less likely to exhibit political interests, at least if your Facebook likes are any indication.

Over the past few months, we’ve crunched countless “Likes” from thousands of users of Trendsetter, our first-of-its-kind platform that ties together polling, social influence data, and consumer preferences. We’ve used it to map the politics of the social web, analyzing the political partisanship of the user bases of various social properties. Using predictive modeling of Facebook likes, we tied political preferences and engagement to one’s choice of social media, and this bubble graph is the result:

Many of the results intuitively make sense. Sites that tend to skew more Republican include those oriented towards commerce and personal finance — like PayPal, eBay, Zillow and LinkedIn (not to mention Amazon, albeit at lower levels of political engagement). Sites that index higher for political engagement include Quora, BuzzFeed, and Wikipedia, which emphasize information and knowledge. Meanwhile, visual pinboards and social games may be fertile ground for the campaigns to find new voters, as those sites often demonstrate defined political leanings combined with lower levels of political engagement.

In the past few weeks, Trendsetter users have weighed in on topics as diverse as the Presidential race, gay marriage, health care, and whether Kurt Busch should be banned from NASCAR. We tie polling results to Facebook likes and levels of user engagement and give you a customized report of your Facebook influence and that of your friends’.

If you find this interesting, we hope you’ll share it!
2012-04-19

Introducing Trendsetter: Discover Who’s Influential and What They Care About

Understanding influence is a huge topic in social media. A number of players, like Klout and PeerIndex, have built hugely successful platforms around rewarding highly influential social media users.

These platforms are great at measuring celebrity. If you’re Lady Gaga, you have a Klout score of 92. If you’re Barack Obama, your score is 91. Beyond that, microcelebrities with large Twitter followings and a healthy degree of interaction on the platform will earn high Klout scores, but what we’re talking about is a relatively small sliver of the social media universe.

This left us wondering: what would a good influence score look like for the rest of us who aren’t Twitter celebrities? And specifically, what does it look like on Facebook, the world’s biggest social stage?

Today, we’re launching Trendsetter, a platform which lets you discover who’s influential and what they care about.

Connect with the app and you’ll get your Trendsetter score — and see where you stack up compared to your friends. Trendsetter measures interactions with pages on Facebook and generates an individualized Trendsetter score for you and your friends. A high Trendsetter score means you’re very likely to tell your friends about things on Facebook, have niche tastes, and tend to be early to the party when it comes to liking brands and content. A lower Trendsetter score means you’re quieter in interacting on Facebook and tend to have more mainstream tastes — but when you do share, it’s because it really matters.

For years, through measures like the Net Promoter Score, marketers have been trying to understand the voters and consumers most likely to share things. We have an inkling that just a cursory glance at someone’s social media profile can tell you more about people’s propensity to share, and Trendsetter aims to show you what moves them.

A Trendsetter report gives you a wealth of data about your network — who the biggest early adopters are among your friends, what Facebook pages these early adopters like, what types of things they’re interested in, and how they’re distributed throughout the country. Here’s what my Trendsetter report looks like:

I knew we were onto something when our algorithm ranked Jesse Thomas of the DC-based digital agency JESS3 as the #1 Trendsetter in my network. Jesse is the consummate early adopter, and this makes him the biggest Trendsetter amongst my friends.

Trendsetter is a joint project of Engage and the Winston Group, a strategic communications and polling firm. With the Winston Group, we’ll be developing quick, one-question surveys for Trendsetter users, and breaking down the answers in interesting ways based on user interests and social influence — a level of detail it would be very hard to get at in a traditional opinion survey.

Who are the biggest Trendsetters in your network? Let’s connect and find out!

2012-08-27

Are You a Political Insider?

2012-07-10

Mapping the Politics of the Social Web

2012-04-19

Introducing Trendsetter: Discover Who’s Influential and What They Care About