techPresident - Demographics - Comments

n/p Liza and thanks again

Jill — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 20:10:35 -0500

Let's hope the campaigns are listening.

Oh but wait, there is more

QueenofSpain — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 15:19:59 -0500

Not only am I an elections editor, I'm the producer of Election '08 and we've been trying for months on end to get the candidates to answer our Voter Manifesto. 8.3 million readers per month, the majority of which are women and not a single candidate has accepted and scheduled a 10-15 min video interview.

BlogHer is a non-partisan site. Editors from their own parties will ask the voter manifesto questions (Morra Aarons-Mele and Mary Katharine Ham) and while we've had contact back and forth with each of Obama and Clinton's campaigns, neither have scheduled us.

We've taken to answering the questions FOR THEM via quotes, links, youtube videos, etc.

8.3 million. 8.3 million many of which are women who blog.

8.3 million engaged readers who show up in our discussions on primary days, during televised debates and who have been told over and over and over again they matter greatly in this election.

8.3 million.

You're right

Liza Sabater — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:31:53 -0500

Erin falls into the category of mommyblogger at BlogHer but there's a whole spectrum of women bloggers in the community. I mean, grack!, I'm a founding advisory board member of the conference. LOL!

So you're right, that's an important distinction about the community. Yet I think it's valid to call her a mommyblogger. I mean, I saw at least 20+ momblog who responded to her thread.

Thanks for pointing that out.

=================================
Writer and Publisher
www.lizasabater.com
www.culturekitchen.com
www.dailygotham.com

More comments

Jill — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:06:22 -0500

Hi Liza - I posted Erin's letter a very short time after she wrote it - both on my blog here and at The Moderate Voice. It's a great letter - I'm not 100% sure if I agree with the need for Clinton to step aside, but Erin wrote a fantastic letter.

The one point I'd like to add, though, in case Erin didn't already, is that BlogHer is NOT just mommybloggers. I'm a mom and a blogger, but there's hundreds if not thousands of single women who utilize BlogHer and contribute to it. So - it's a community of women, from what I understand is the way the founders typically look at BlogHer. I could be wrong - Erin and Morra would know best. But I just wanted to say that it's not just moms. You may know that too - but I think it's important to say that it's a community of women, and moms are, of course, women too. :)

I don't know if it was machine tampering

Liza Sabater — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 09:03:49 -0500

I have been following the controversy. The Diebold machines are not just prone to tampering. They are also prone to error. And given that there is no easy way to verify their results or audit the machines, something has to be done in order to properly verify a county's tally before releasing the numbers to the board of elections. I am not just talking about New Hampshire. I am talking about each and every precint that is using Diebold.

Exit Polling Holds the Clue to New Hampshire Obama Loss

bacalove — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 07:32:20 -0500

Exit polls are the clue to the mystery of what happened on Tuesday night regarding the New Hampshire primary and the clue to the losses of both Kerry and Gore. Exit polling both in the Kerry and Gore contest had them both aheard and they are white men. Yet at the end of the day, exit polls were wrong, it had nothing to do with Race then and now. This keeps happening over and over again and no one questoins why, how long are we going to sing this song "what went wrong with the exit polls". Exit polls had Obama way ahead and at the end of the day he lost by 2 percent.

I cannot believe the so-called Intelligentsia of the media are so bewildered and so baffled as to the wide discrepancy between the exit polls and the polling and the so-called actual vote in the Obama total for New Hampshire'sTuesday night primary. In the very first two vote tallys done by paper ballots put in boxes, the exit polls were not wrong, and Obama won those voting places by a large margin. The reason for the later discrepancies are due to MACHINE TAMPERING. The Powers that Be were not ready to give Obama the victory. It happened with Gore, it happened with Kerry and it will happen with Huckabee. HOWEVER, IT DID NOT HAPPEN IN THE IOWA CAUCUSES BECAUSE PEOPLE STAND UP IN THE LIGHT OF DAY AND ARE COUNTED. The Powers that Be cannot control that. And, until we address this secret weapon of the Powers that Be, the people cannot vote their true choice into office, that would be like putting the power into the People's hands -- imagine that! The Media, as a whole, is acting negligent and irresponsible and has an obligation and a duty to inform the public and question all options. Not a duty to stay silent, like they did after 911, and we got into a war that should never have been. It was not racial that skewed the voting total, as Obama has broad appeal to all races, sexes and ages. May be the so called intelligentsia would like us to believe that so we cannot see the truth. They keep questioning and saying -- even the exit polls when we ask people said Obama was ahead. What went wrong? We can bring up questions and scenarios and ask can a computer hijack an airplane? Of course. Can a computer hack/change votes? Most Definitely! Now they are having a debate over ID Cards when the debate should be about how to have a voting system the people can believe in. INCREDULOUS! WILL THE MEDIA FAIL US AGAIN?

vote fraud against Obama and Paul

JMalone TN — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:35:53 -0500

Clear Evidence Of Widespread Vote Fraud In New Hampshire

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
January 9, 2008

There were several major vote fraud issues to arise out of the New Hampshire primary revolving mainly around Ron Paul and Barack Obama, who were both seemingly cheated out of third and first places respectively as a result of rigged Diebold voting machines and deliberate malfeasance in the counting of hand-written paper ballots.

- Obama had a 13 to 15 point lead over Hillary Clinton heading into the primary. Nothing occured that boosted Hillary’s numbers immediately before the election, in fact immediately after the staged crying incident, many pundits argued it could only have harmed her chances. And yet Hillary somehow managed to instigate a near 20 point swing to defeat Obama by three per cent. If not for her 7% swing as a result of Diebold voting machines, Hillary would have lost to Obama. If Obama was struggling he would probably contest this bizarre outcome, but he is likely to accept the results simply to save face.

- Going into New Hampshire Ron Paul was polling in the early teens and was a strong bet to take third place behind McCain and Romney. Four days before the vote, Rasmussen had Paul at 14% - a significant lead over Huckabee on 11% and Giuliani on 8% - and yet Ron Paul finished with just 8%. Proof of clear vote fraud, allied with the fact that Paul’s numbers show a 6% swing from normally accurate pre-polling forecasts, clearly indicate chicanery was at hand, especially considering the fact that Paul lost those crucial few percentage points to Giuliani as a reuslt of electronic Diebold voting machines which are known to be wide open to tampering and fraud.

- Going purely on hand-counts, which as we saw in Sutton were by no means angelic but at least harder to cheat on than Diebold voting machines without getting caught, Ron Paul would have won 15% of the vote and finished third. This figure would have more accurately correlated to the pre-primary polls rather than the ridiculous 8% he was eventually given.

- Numerous districts reported totals of anything up to 22% for "other candidates". What on earth does this black hole of "other candidates" mean? How can one vote for a candidate that is not on the ballot without spoiling the ballot paper? The district of Lisbon reported 22.5% votes for this mysterious "other" candidate, while in the large district of Londonderry, the "other" candidate received 10%. Many are now alleging that these "other" votes were merely siphoned from Ron Paul to keep his final number low.

- Rudy Giuliani, the 9/11 candidate who beat Ron Paul thanks to the aid of a 3% swing on Diebold voting machines, received 9.11% of the vote in three different towns. Coincidence or somebody’s idea of a sick joke?

- The New Hampshire town of Sutton admits that it voided every vote Ron Paul received. The Congressman got 31 votes and yet due to a "human error," Sutton reported zero votes for Ron Paul. How "human error" can explain not counting 31 votes in succession for one single candidate is beyond the pale and Ron Paul’s campaign should ask for a recount across New Hampshire immediately.

- As soon as people went public with the fact that their votes in Sutton had not been counted, other districts where Paul had supposedly received zero votes, such as Greenville, suddenly changed their final tallies and attributed votes to the Congressman.

Ad Age on Facebook

Jim Crumley — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 09:51:21 -0400

Ad Age has an interesting article today on the value of self-reported data on Facebook. It asks the question, "are people telling the truth about their age, etc. in their profiles?" Based solely on your data, I personally think they are. Or at least they aren't lying so much and so deliberately that it makes a big difference at this point. Tastes in bands and tv shows will definitely change and people will normalize their cultural preferences to "fit in". But the basic demographics in your spreadsheet I think are good. They make sense and sometimes that's all you have go on. The only real way to know is to test. If an ad campaign tailored to conservatives works, then the data is good enough.

Ruffini is calling the kettle black on website inaccuracies

stephenfox — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 22:43:45 -0400

I am baffled by just one thing in Patrick Ruffini's commentary.
I must say at the onset that I read his reportage religiously, several times a day, on most of the new stories and blog comments on Bill Richardson, my choice for President, and Ruffini's grasp of the breadth of kinds of articles is almost alway top knotch.

Except for just one small fact: Ruffini still lists ex-Iowa Governor Vilsack as one of the Democratic candidates, even though he has withdrawn many months ago, and even despite the fact that I sent Mr. Ruffini 4 emails to that effect to remind him that Vilsack had quit, but to no avail....

Thus, it seems a bit hypocritical for Mr. Ruffini to blast the outgoing Brownback for his lack of internet attention, when Mr. Ruffini seems to have paid little attention to his own website on this change in candidates, or to his own fan's emails reminding him to correct his own website.

Agree

Jim Crumley — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 12:27:40 -0400

I agree. 18-24 year olds are notoriously difficult to market to directly because they don't yet have the credit, voting or consumer histories that their parents do. Facebook could easily be a better media choice for colleges, distance learning centers and other marketers who must really zero in on this market segment. I would imagine that as Facebook grows any direct marketer will be able to overlay their own cutomer/constituent model over Facebook's users and then they are off to the races. And the value of self-reported data depends on how it is collected. It is usually more reliable than inferred/modeled data and thus more expensive to collect and rent.

Good points

Patrick Ruffini — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 04:02:10 -0400

That's right. I'm not sure Facebook is replacing big data vendors like Acxiom any time soon. But you could argue that this is a nice supplement to that data for the younger demographic, who tend not to consume content online and not subscribe to magazines that would make them a data point for the big commercial firms. Plus, I would imagine this is a better guide to cross-referencing media consumption patterns (favorite TV shows, movies, books) than most commercial vendors.

I also think we need to get away from the idea that self-reported data is bad data. If someone cares enough to self-report an interest in your product, that's the kind of customer you want. I'd think you'd want to profile those people moreso than folks who give the right answer when prompted.

Cool find

Luigi Montanez — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 23:19:32 -0400

This is a great find, thanks for sharing. A free database of millions of users' self-identified political leanings and interests/affiliations is pretty amazing.

But I'll echo some of the words of caution above. First, this data is most useful for understanding the Facebook-using population, which skews more liberal, educated, affluent, younger, and tech-savvy than the rest of the population as you noted in your previous post. So any data gleaned should be interpreted with those facts in mind, or normalized appropriately.

Second, the simple results aren't all that interesting outside of the context of placing ad buys. Of course more conservatives will like Garth Brooks and football, and more liberals will like the West Wing and be vegetarian. Where the real value will come from is when/if this raw data gets put into a data warehouse and goes through more sophisticated mining techniques. That's where the unexpected, "gee I hadn't thought of that" data will come from. But as mentioned above, if money is going to be invested in such an undertaking, better to use the already existing consumer data providers like Choicepoint, instead of self-identified data from Facebook. Also, Facebook knows the tremendous value of mining their data (they certainly do it already) for their own advertising deals, and would never expose such sophisticated tools to the public.

Good data but let's not get too carried away.

Jim Crumley — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 22:44:01 -0400

This data is excellent and certainly light years ahead of what was available before from social networking sites. However, "the greatest microtargeting engine ever built" might be a bit optimistic. Almost all, if not all of these market segments can already be found on the market. I don't think it's in Facebook's strategic plans to compete with the credit bureaus and other monster data compilers who build models based on thousands of data points for each and every household in America.

Notes

thegreathal — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 20:58:52 -0400

1. Are libertarians excluded, or just grouped with another constituency?

2. Should you be tracking the number of conservatives vs. liberals overall on Facebook, or proportionately versus each other?

--Hal Levy / studentsforkucinich.com

Interesting stuff!

edmondthehun — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 12:13:53 -0400

As a stats junkie I will definitely be playing with this stuff... looks like conservatives favor Switchfoot and Lifehouse by about 2-to-1 margins and liberals favor Rihanna and Jay-Z by about 2-to-1 margins. I'll have to come back to this.