Vote 2010: Can Facebook predict the outcome of Alabama races?
By Wade Kwon
Video: Karen Hughes talks about social media
in modern campaigns
Facebook is the king of social media outlets, but can it predict elections?
Karen Hughes serves as Global Vice Chair of Burson-Marsteller, a public relations firm, but before that, she was an undersecretary in the State Department and campaign manager for George W. Bush’s Texas gubernatorial run. At BlogWorld 2010, her keynote mentioned an interesting study.
Looking at 10 Senate and 10 House races, the number of Facebook Likes on the candidates’ pages correlated with the primary results. Many candidates with more Likes than their opponents won their races.
Using that assumption, we looked at the races for Congress, for state office and for Jefferson County, tallying Facebook Likes for candidates to predict winners. (In several instances, a candidate used his profile page, making it an apples-to-oranges comparison of Likes vs. Friends.)
We’ll see how accurate these predictions are next week.
Election Day is Tuesday.
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Update Nov. 2: ABC 33/40 interviewed me for Monday’s 6 p.m. newscast.
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Update Nov. 9: With nine of 13 races predicted correctly, the Facebook election predictor debuted with a 69.2 percent rate of accuracy.
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Key:
- D = Democrat | I = Incumbent | R = Republican
- * – Facebook profile page | ** – Facebook group page
- If a candidate had both a Facebook campaign page and profile page, the Likes from the former were used.
- red = leading in Facebook Likes
Check out the actual election results.
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More Vote 2010 coverage.
Friday, October 29, 2010, 7:58 pm
Fascinating! I can’t wait to see how the numbers play out.
Friday, October 29, 2010, 8:23 pm
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Monday, November 1, 2010, 12:30 pm
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Tuesday, November 2, 2010, 11:54 am
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