What’s the point of the brandadvocacy08.com site?

• MotiveQuest will use our Online Promoter Score to predict the outcome of the 2008 election. On a daily basis we will measure advocacy for McCain and Obama by observing online conversations between real people. We will also share the Top 10 words associated with each candidate

What’s the Online Promoter™ Score?

• The Online Promoter Score is a metric created by MotiveQuest to help brand owners measure brand health. We do this by observing how many people are recommending a given brand or product in online conversations. It is the first metric based on online word of mouth to show a correlation with sales. This was documented in the recent book “Groundswell” from Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research. The Online Promoter Score measures the number of individuals who are advocating (promoting, recommending) a brand and separates these individuals from and other brands that they might like but not advocate. It also measures changes in advocacy over time.

Where can I get more information about the Online Promoter Score and brand advocacy?

• MotiveQuest in combination with professors from Northwestern University has looked in detail at how advocacy translates to results – see
• Advocacy in Cellular
• Advocacy in Automotive
• Advocacy for Mini

What is the source of your data?

• Every day MotiveQuest pulls data from popular online, groups, forums, blogs and other social media. For BrandAdvocacy08, we’re looking at 30 top non-political forums and the 10 top political forums. This gives us a broad sample of conversations to measure advocacy for Barack Obama and John McCain. Each day we’re analyzing about 30,000 messages from 6,000 people.

How does this compare with traditional polling data?

• It is very different.  We look at organic conversations online.  We are not asking any direct questions or targeting particular respondents.  We are just looking at what people are naturally talking about and recommending when they speak about politics or the candidates online.  We have compiled our data to loosely reflect the population as much as possible and the top places of conversation on the internet, while additionally including the top sites of political conversation.
  

Why are Obama and McCain smiling or scowling?

• They smile or scowl based on whether or not they gained advocacy that day.

What are the “Top Words Associated with Each Candidate”?

• We use advanced statistical analysis to understand which words are most relevant to the discussion each day. If you click on the word it links to the original news stories that prompted online discussion around that issue/candidate.

DATA QUESTIONS

Is there a bias in people who create or react to content online towards the democratic and liberal candidates?

1. First, if you look at the trend data on Brandadvocay08 it is clear that sometimes Obama has led and sometimes McCain has led so on a very simple level this does not seem to be true.
2. Second, when we created the dataset we were careful to create a representative dataset of both ordinary people and political commentators.  For example on the site we have links to one of each for Democrats http://www.topix.com/forum/us/democrat and for Republicans http://www.topix.com/forum/us/republican. We found that there are plenty of Republicans who are online also.
3. In addition we can look at the underlying constant of regression the CNN Poll of Polls and Obama’s Online Promoter™ Score to determine if there is an “online bias”.  The CNN Poll of Polls shows a constant of 50.8%, MQ’s OPS shows a constant of 49.6%.
4. MQ’s data does not reflect a particularly liberal bias, other slices of data might, if we look more recently perhaps one could be emerging but over the 9/1 to 10/20 time frame there doesn’t appear to be one.
5. This also depends on your belief in the bias of the poll of polls, I’m not a polling person and can’t say if there is a bias in the poll of polls.

 

Do people online just like to talk about the Wow activities (like Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live) vs the real Issues?

Every day we highlight the words that are most highly correlated with each candidate.

  They show what issues the nation is associating with each.  Sometimes it is true that they focus on the Wow stories but we see that they are just as likely to be seriously discussing the real issues (taxes, God, wealth, etc).  Don’t underestimate the power of forums as a place everyday people share their fears and thoughts with others like them.  For example take a look at this discussion on Partenting.com’s forums: http://forums.parenting.com/showthread.php?t=1881&highlight=mccain

How does Online advocacy relate to traditional polls?

• From one perspective, it’s apples and oranges, polls attempt to measure the outcome of the presidential election if it were held on a particular day, MQ is measuring the number of people who are advocating a particular candidate. 
• On the flip side, if you believe as we do that people advocating to each other is an important piece of the future success of brands, products (and candidates) then we hope to show that the candidate with the most advocates will be the winner of the election.
• Important caveat, we don’t have an electoral college or battleground states so at best we can hope to use advocacy as an indicator of the popular vote.
• Using the data from the CNN Poll of Polls as a comparison metric, HYPOTHETICALLY, let’s assume that CNN Poll of Polls represents “truth”, we can apply straight forward regression to determine if the Advocacy metric for Obama is statistically related to the Poll of Polls data. 
• Regression shows that Obama’s Online Promoter™ score is statistically significant in linkage to the CNN’s poll of Polls results at > 98%

1. Furthermore, we can look to see if perhaps MQ’s results might lead the traditional polling methods, the relation appears strongest at 4-days leading.

 

The strongest statistical link from Obama’s Online Promoter™ Score to the CNN Poll of Poll’s results appears when we make Obama’s OPS a 4-day leading indicator of the Poll of Polls

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