November 26, 2012; Source: TechPresident (Personal Democracy Media)
The co-founder of Personal Democracy Media, Micah Sifry, demonstrates the social media success of President Barack Obama. Nonprofits are always looking for robust social media metrics, and boy do Obama’s numbers look good. Here’s what Sifry found:
|
|
Election 2008 |
Election 2012 |
Difference |
|
Barack Obama Facebook Friends |
2,397,253 |
32,313,965 |
+29,916,712 |
|
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125,639 |
22,112,160 |
+21,986,521 |
|
Amount raised online by Obama campaign |
$500 million to Obama 2008, of which $403 originated digitally |
$690 million to Obama 2012, of which $504 million originated digitally |
+$190 million, of which $101 million originated digitally |
|
Total number of donors to Obama campaign |
3.95 million |
4.4 million |
+0.45 million |
Good metrics, right? Though Sifry does come comparisons of the Obama and Romney campaigns in 2012 showing Obama’s social media superiority, these statistics may demonstrate how much of our society—and probably how much of the nonprofit sector’s world—is now to be measured by online metrics. In a new form of organizational entropy, if your social media metrics aren’t on the upswing, your organization may be sliding downward. The issue may not even be one of whether your numbers are going up…it might be the degree of the slope.—Rick Cohen
