The business world might still be dominated by men but the “world’s leading business publication” doesn’t only want to speak to them. Social Media Editor Liz Heron is trying to broaden The Wall Street Journal‘s readership with content that appeals to a younger, female audience.

That’s a tall order for WSJ, whose audience is predominantly male (82 percent), with an average age of 57. For comparison’s sake, The New York Times, where Heron left her social media position last spring, claims an equal male-female readership with an average age of 51.

“For any print newspaper, we’ve all been looking to find readers and subscribers,” Heron told The Content Strategist. “We’re taking advantage of communities like Pinterest that happen to have a lot of women as an opportunity to highlight our lesser-known coverage.”

One way to reach a broader audience is by showcasing broader viewpoints. In August, WSJ launched Worldstream, which plays video on a wide variety of topics from a wide variety of locations. The social team collaborate on it with Mark Scheffler’s mobile video unit.

The video platform, Heron says, is a way for WSJ to use its journalists from around the world. “It brings readers along with us, where they can’t go,” said Heron, who graduated from Oberlin College, where she focused on Latin American studies.

Already Worldstream has brought WSJ readers on a number of adventures, from the Senkaku Islands to see the dispute between China and Japan, to the streets of Bagdhad for knockoff fastfood. The video stream is one of the broadsheet’s wide variety of social media efforts, which are handled by the six fulltime journalists who comprise WSJ’s social media team.

The team employs social media strategies that are tailored to each platform. For example, to post to Twitter, WSJ uses Socialflow. It can measure audience interest in a certain topic and release tweets — written earlier by the social media team — accordingly.

The strategy for Facebook, on the other hand, is more image-driven.

“Facebook is more of a personal network — it has a lower tolerance for realtime coverage,” Heron, 34, said. ”It’s easier to grasp something visual when you’re grazing through your social media news feed. It’s also easier to share with friends: ‘Look at this graph. It will tell you everything you need to know about the Facebook IPO.’”

Heron, said she discovered the true power of social media in 2009, when she was working in her hometown of Washington, DC at The Washington Post. There, at the foreign desk during the Iranian election protests, she worked with a reporter in Iran who couldn’t leave his apartment. From the US she worked with him to find information through YouTube and Twitter.

“It’s like having eyes in different places,” Heron said. “It really woke me up to the possibilites of social media.”

Heron contributed to WSJ’s streaming multimedia and social coverage of the presidential campaigns. The streaming coverage, which she called a ”live blog on steroids,” combined traditional news stories, with social media, video, pictures and comments.

The social focus covered the election, but it also covered social media — when social media itself was the news. For Heron, that meant Big Bird and Clint Eastwood’s chair both shared space — and a platform — with traditional election coverage.

Journalism is changing. Perhaps the demographics of WSJ readers might too.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

The presidential candidates are vying to control how the American government spends its money. Perhaps they should start with how they spend their own.

This is the most expensive presidential campaign in history, with the candidates et al spending a combined $730 million on ads alone. In swing states, the amount of advertising in communities is particularly high (Las Vegas, Nevada topped the list with 73,000 campaign ads this year). For Americans — especially those in swing states — this unprecedented ad money means that candidates come at us not only on TV and radio, but also via texts, websites and social media.

Indeed, social media and internet campaign spending are growing as people more frequently turn to those media, adding to an ever-growing campaign tab.

The Content Strategist spoke this week to two political science professors, each of whom co-authored separate academic studies on the lasting effects of campaign ads. Both came to similar conclusions: While advertising is effective at first, those effects don’t last.

Donald Green, professor at Columbia University, published a paper last year that studied Texas Governor Rick Perry’s 2006 re-election campaign. It showed that ads gave Perry a significant bump immediately after airing. That bump, however, dissipated completely a week or two later, leading Green to think that campaign ads would be more effective — and excusable — closer to election day.

“What’s harder to understand is the tens of millions of dollars spent over the summer,” he said.

Green also referred The Content Strategist to a 2008 study he coauthored that compared counties in non-swing-states in media markets across the country. One county received spillover ads from a neighboring swing state. Another similar county did not. Green found that the ads had no effect on voter turnout, leading him to refer to the current campaign ad excess as a ”kind of public works program for media buyers.”

Seth Hill, assistant professor at University of California, San Diego, was slightly more generous, calling campaign ads “somewhat effective.”

In “How Quickly We Forget: The Duration of Persuasion Effects from Mass Communication,” Hill and three other authors concluded that “while some persuasion effects do endure, most do not.”

While he found that half the effect is gone in just a few days, he suggests that candidates may have other reasons for spending early on, such as encouraging their base and, by extension, their campaign funds.

Both Hill and Green admitted that the effect of ads is difficult to measure because it’s impossible to do in isolation. And as of yet, there have been no studies on campaigns of this magnitude.

“The main problem is that when both candidates are airing ads, if the net effect is small, we don’t know if the ads are ineffective or if they are just canceling each other out,” Hill told The Content Strategist. That uncertainty has caused what Hill called an “arms race” between the candidates. It’s also unclear how negative and positive ads affect voters, though some have argued that negative ads actually keep people from the polls.

And what about the sheer saturation of ads? Do people being to just block it out, like so much other background noise? Or do they have the possibility of backfiring? And, should brands take notice of this as they plan their own content strategies?

The truth is, no one knows — except perhaps the candidates, who aren’t telling. More likely, the candidates are going not with what they know but, rather, by what is normal. They are following a better safe than sorry logic — to the tune of what could ultimately be $8 million.

“Clearly Bud and Coca-Cola feel like they need to be advertising every day of the entire year,” Hill said. ”Whether you can overshoot and annoy people to the extent of purging them is unclear. It’s very clear why you’d want to be on the air a lot.”

At least for now we don’t know if it hurts.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Social media analysts appease our dark desire to know what others think about us—at least in the public social media sphere.

Analysts scour social networking sites to get people’s opinions, positive or negative, and find out what they’re saying about a certain person, business or idea.

Sentiment analysis, as it’s called, is a natural fit for the presidential campaigns, an area fiercely polled, plotted and politicked.

This election season, analysts are further zeroing in on the most hallowed of all ground for candidates: swing states and, by extension, their oft-sought after yet still mysterious undecided voters.

This week, The Content Strategist spoke to two firms specializing in sentiment analysis — Attensity and SDL — and highlighted their research to get a better idea of the plusses and pitfalls of gauging sentiment.

How does it work?

Both SDL and Attensity use proprietary software to gauge social media sentiments for the candidates, especially in swing states. For this specific analysis, Attensity monitored opinions on Twitter, while SDL used Twitter, Facebook and the “blogosphere.”

Attensity creates a pie chart to show the relationship of good and bad tweets out of total “sentimented” tweets, while SDL assigns a percentage point: positive posts – negative posts / total posts x 100.

According to Attensity’s Vice President of Strategy Michelle de Haaff, the software goes to great lengths to account for all the different names for candidates — pres, Mitt, Obama, Gov. Romney — as well as subtleties in sentiment. ”Good job Romney” counts as positive, while “Good job Romney, you moron” is decidedly negative. Something like ”The candidates are debating” is neutral and discarded.

What does sentiment analysis say?

Both sites showed Obama to have a distant lead in the sentiment campaign — if not so distant in the real one.

Romney, on the other hand, is no social media darling. Although it’s tempting to say that means he’ll be unpopular among voters, there are a number of reasons why he might be less popular on social media than in voting booths.

For starters:

• Obama has been using social media — and using it well — since his first presidential campaign. Romney came later to the game and has fewer followers across the social media landscape. Obama has 21 million Twitter followers compared to Romney’s 1.5 million; Obama has 31 million Facebook likes while Romney has 10.5 million.
• Romney’s followers are older than Obama’s. Obviously, people who didn’t grow up with social media technology are less likely to use it.
• Liberals are more active than conservatives on social media.

According to Attensity, Obama predominantly had positive sentiment geared at him, with “Go Obama” being a top tweet sentiment topic. Romney, on the other hand, had a higher rate of negative comments, specifically regarding his ability to handle foreign policy.

SDL found the main topics discussed in sentiment to be abortion, Medicare and Social Security, protecting the middle class, jobs and economy, budget deficit, Obamacare and foreign policy.

Who is on social media, anyway?

According to a recent Pew study, social networking users are more likely to be young, female and liberal. Pingdom maps out social media demographics for a number of sites here. (Note that the average is not as good a measure as median, because outliers can skew the average up or down.)

Also keep in mind that the demographics of the average Internet user is not necessarily the same as the average voter.

Do people vote the way they tweet?

Attensity includes a rather interesting measure: Whom people say (on Twitter) they are going to vote for. What is most startling (and better illustrated by the study of the second debate) is that voting intentions don’t necessarily match up with negative/positive sentiments.

For example, during the Oct. 16 debate, Iowa Twitter users had nearly all positive things to say about Obama and mostly negative comments about Romney. However, they were way more likely to state their intention to vote for Romney.

What this drives home is that, although sentiment can indicate the popularity of a candidate, it isn’t a surefire way of seeing who will win. After all, many other factors are at play.

The Twitter users who state their voting intentions aren’t necessarily the ones saying positive or negative sentiments. Also, saying you’ll vote for Obama on Twitter is not the same as showing up and voting at the polls.

Actions always speak louder than words.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Most have said that Mitt Romney won last week’s presidential debate. In his emails following the event, he’s sure been acting like it.

For this edition of Content Campaign 2012, we took a look at the candidates’ emails following the debates to see how one can capitalize on a win or mediate a loss through content strategy.

Generally the candidates send out roughly an equal number of emails, but this week Romney kicked it into high gear. The Romney campaign was responsible for 14 of the 21 emails sent after the debate (Thursday night through the end of the debate news cycle Sunday). That’s a lot of emails (about four a day).

More importantly it shows a marked difference in tone for Romney, who seems to have gained significant confidence from the first debate. His once quotidian emails imploring constituents to get to know him now have a touch of excitement as a more promising election draws near.

Within an hour of the debate, the emails began. Republican VP candidate Paul Ryan declared Romney the debate’s winner, while US Senator and former Republican VP possibility Marco Rubio maintained that “the choice this November could not be clearer.”

In the subsequent days, Romney’s whole family stepped in, armed with new hope and a highlight reel.

The debate aftermath wasn’t as glorious for the Democrats. After the debate, Obama sidestepped the issue of winning or losing by saying, “I hope I made you proud out there explaining the vision we share for this country.”

In tone and type it was consistent with most of Obama’s other emails — most of which address voters by name; the Romney camp prefers the general “friend.”

 The next morning, Romney was emboldened by what had by then been widely considered a victory in his favor. His following two email subjects read: “Victory is in Sight.” He thanked his supporters — “friends” — for their help and asked for their continued participation in the campaign.

Obama’s campaign manager, in turn, used Romney’s “Victory Is In Sight” subject line against him to goad Obama’s constituents into action.

The Romney campaign mentioned the debate in nearly half of its emails. The Obama camp only directly mentioned it twice — once to mock Mitt Romney about defunding PBS and, by extension, Big Bird. The Obama campaign has been especially good this season at using the other campaign’s content against it.

Romney’s campaign has been starving for a victory — any kind of victory — practically ever since it was started. The debate gave them the first taste of that.

Now it’s up to Paul Ryan in the VP debate against Joe Biden to see if the Republicans can keep up the momentum.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Last week Mitt Romney found himself in an uncomfortable pickle — or maybe a pica? —regarding his unlicensed commercial use of a font.

“Pay-what-you-want fonts are there to make the work affordable to people who can’t pay like others,” James T. Edmonson, the creator of Wisdom Script, the font in question, told The Content Strategist. “So when an organization uses the font who clearly has funds allocated for these types of expenses, it’s a bit of a slap in the face.”

Rather than dwell on what the candidates’ font use might mean about their regard for copyright law, this week’s Content Campaign 2012 installment focuses on the messages the fonts themselves send. We asked designers of various fonts now in use by Obama and Romney what they had in mind when designing them in hopes of gaining insight into what the campaigns are going for — at least in a design sense.

According to Edmonson, Wisdom Script, which the Romney campaign used on T-Shirts that were for sale on his online store, was originally designed for Woods of Wisdom, a poster series of bad advice.

“Because I was creating sarcastic posters, it was important that the typeface reflect a sense of honesty, a look that was familiar and trustworthy,” said the San Francisco based typographer. By setting the font, which is available at Lost Type Co-op, on a 30-degree incline, he wanted to make the font seem optimistic.

Obama’s campaign, too, claimed a font on Lost Type Co-op, though it has not yet used it. According to its creator Andy Mangold, the font Pompadour‘s numerals were designed to be displayed at very large sizes and were meant to look “sassy and elegant.”

Perhaps counter-intuitively, Mangold said he’s glad the font, whose numerals “are catered to desktop calendar cubes with a single number on each side,” hasn’t been used by the campaign.

“It would look goofy to set 2012 in Pompadour,” the Baltimore-based designer said.

Though the presidential candidates have many divergent content purposes for which to solicit distinctive fonts, they derive their main fonts from more widely known fare.

Both Romney and Obama have purchased their main fonts from Hoefler & Frere-Jones‘ ample stock, although Obama has been more widely praised for patronizing the popular American typography foundry. (The Obama campaign only specifically commissioned an Obama-Biden logo, and the rest were readymade by H&FJ).

According to Tobias Frere-Jones, principal and director of typography at H&FJ, the Obama Campaign uses mainly Sentinel and Gotham. The majority of Romney’s content is written in Whitney and Mercury Display.

H&FJ has a lot to say about its fonts (the descriptions are elaborate and a joy to read in full). We’ve included relatively brief excerpts below so you can see what they’re trying to say.

Sentinel

“Unbound by traditions that deny italics, by technologies that limit its design, or by ornamental details that restrict its range of weights, Sentinel is a fresh take on this useful and lovely style, offering for the first time a complete family that’s serviceable for both text and display. From the Antique style it borrows a program of contrasting thicks and thins, but trades that style’s frumpier mannerisms for more attractive contemporary details.”

Gotham

“Gotham celebrates the attractive and unassuming lettering of the city…Gotham is that rarest of designs, the new typeface that somehow feels familiar. From the lettering that inspired it, Gotham inherited an honest tone that’s assertive but never imposing, friendly but never folksy, confident but never aloof.”

Mercury Display

“Spirited, subtle, ferocious.

A succinct family of display faces, Mercury answers the call for a contemporary serif that’s smart, quick, and articulate.”

Whitney

“Typefaces for catalogs and brochures need to be narrow enough to work in crowded environments, yet energetic enough to encourage extended reading. But typefaces designed for wayfinding programs need to be open enough to be legible at a distance, and sturdy enough to withstand a variety of fabrication techniques: fonts destined for signage need to anticipate being cast in bronze, etched in glass, cut in vinyl, and rendered in pixels.

“While American ‘gothics’ such as News Gothic (1908) have long been a mainstay of editorial settings, and European ‘humanists’ such as Frutiger (1975) have excelled in signage applications, Whitney bridges this divide in a single design. Its compact forms and broad x-height use space efficiently, and its ample counters and open shapes make it clear under any circumstances.”

The fonts and what they convey are surely complex — but they’re certainly clearer and more straightforward than some of the messages the candidates are trying to send using them.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Sometimes good content comes from the opposition. The best content can come straight from the opposition’s mouth.

The secret recordings Mother Jones published  this week of comments Mitt Romney made during a high-end fundraiser might have provided the best content yet for the Democratic campaign.

Indeed, Obama is now leading in the polls and that could be partly due to leveraging Romney’s comments about the 47 percent to create a wide range of its own content for the Democratic campaign.

These include a bunch of posts to its own site, an infographic, a call for donations and plenty more.

The Democrats have even been able to push the flurry of media response as content by posting it on their own site. And it’s spread much further. For instance, according to BuzzFeed, the day following the release of the videos by Mother Jones, Romney’s comments made the covers of 41 swing state newspapers.

Most importantly, these video recordings have allowed the Obama camp to further distribute the Romney video itself. Indeed, as Mashable pointed out, within a day the secret clip had more views than Romney’s official videos, released months before.

In a new Obama campaign ad made from the footage, voters watching iPads react to Romney’s comments and disapprove.

“It shows that he’s out of touch if he feels that half the country feels like victims,” one woman says.

“As a president, if you try to separate by demographics, separate by classes, you are not really a president,” a man standing with his daughter says.

“The fact that Mitt Romney made all these comments behind closed doors really shows his character,” says another woman.

And really, that’s the heart of it.  

Using real content, other people’s real content, lets viewers feel privy to the truth, which feels refreshing when they are so often barraged by lies. They get to see what was hidden from them — and that something was hidden from them they certainly can believe.

Why does it work? Look no further than the horse’s mouth

In a world where everyone is rightfully a skeptic — where people are used to being misled by everything from the media to their products to their politicians — having real, complete footage can seem like the last vestige of truth. (And even that notion has its detractors; for a meta example, take Mother Jones’ response to Romney’s response, called “Romney’s Video Debunking Claim Is…Debunked“).

Real footage is at least more difficult to dispute than the chains of he said, she said.

And history knows this too. And so do presidential candidates. Since the advent of recording technology people have been using those technologies in ways they weren’t initially intended.  There has been no shortage of examples in presidential campaigns over the years.

Ronald Reagan made Walter Mondale wish he’d eaten his own words about raising taxes. George Bush had a field day with John Kerry’s remarks about voting for the Iraq War before he voted against it. Saying he’d be fine with spending 100 years in Iraq certainly didn’t help John Mccain.

The practice of using what an opponent actually says is so effective, Romney has even tried it himself as a way to counter his own video. To steer public opinion against Obama following the secret video release, Romney brought up a 1997 video in which Obama tells Loyola students he believes in redistribution.

Unfortunately, this audio isn’t complete, so it will have a much tougher time convincing the skeptics.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Both the Republican and Democratic nominating conventions had high viewership, with 35 million tuning in to see Barack Obama, and 30 million for Mitt Romney, according to Nielsen ratings.

The conventions may not do much to sway voters, but they do go a long way toward energizing each party’s base — and they provide a lot of lessons for content strategists.

Last week, The Content Strategist broke down the Republicans. Now, we take a look at the Democratic National Convention to see what we can learn.

True content = good content, aka 2+2=4

Bill Clinton wowed a rapt audience with a speech full of facts – factcheck.org called it “our Cinton nightmare” on account of the sheer amount of fact-checking work his speech required. Fortunately for Democrats, the facts checked out.

The figures he cited, that the U.S. is 16th in the world as far as percentage of college graduates, and the Democrats have created more private sector jobs than Republicans, were startling and powerful facts. And the fact that they checked out means that the force of his oratory wasn’t undermined by accusations of playing fast and loose with the truth.

Clinton’s speech in this regard was a contrast to Paul Ryan‘s RNC speech a week earlier, which largely relied on platitudes and was immediately attacked for being untruthful in parts.

In content strategy — as in most situations — lies tend to come back to haunt you.

Don’t upstage the main event

Although Michelle Obama and former president Clinton’s stellar speeches might have slightly upstaged the president, what really buried his steam was the disappointing August jobs report released the day after Obama accepted his nomination.

Instead of allowing the media to wallow in what was a widely well-received speech by Obama, the Bureau of Labor Statistic report turned the public’s attention to more alarming news: It found that the unemployment rate saw a slight decrease only because 368,000 Americans gave up looking for work.

Of course, Obama couldn’t control the timing of these results, but they certainly put a damper on his momentum. Whatever stands out in the news cycle will become part of the collective memory of the event.

Just as the RNC will be remembered for Clint Eastwood and his abstract performance with a chair, instead of Mitt Romney’s long-awaited charisma, the 2012 DNC will have to share space with a dismal jobs report.

Keep it simple

Obama’s pheonomal speaking talents couldn’t overcome his difficult message, which boiled down to: ”Things are not as bad as they could have been.” It’s a hard message to rally behind — especially on live TV.

Complexities obviously have their place in the political world, but as any public speaker or journalist knows, it’s better to keep messages simple.

Stay on point

During what was supposed to be a celebration dedicated to Obama’s nomination acceptance, the Democrats at times veered off course.

Convention Chair and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa held a strange vote on the floor about whether to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

There were many points that potential voters were looking to see addressed. Staging an imbroglio on the convention floor was not one of them.

Evoke an emotional response

Any content strategist will tell you, the most powerful thing messages can do is evoke an emotional response from your audience. If people are able to connect with the message on a personal level, they’re more likely to buy — or vote for — what you’re selling.

Both parties attempted to tug on emotions, but the Democrats were more successful at this during their convention, where tears and rapt attention were more in evidence among the crowd. It also helped that the DNC featured more women and people of color to represent a more diverse audience.

Additionally, both of the Obamas can touch on hardships in their histories, a theme that has been absent from Mitt Romney’s personal narrative.

Barack Obama’s mixed race and childhood with a single mother, and Michelle Obama‘s humble upbringing, with a father who was a blue-collar worker who labored despite of Multiple Sclerosis, help them seem more relatable to many Americans.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Michael Hayes’ ambition to make BuzzFeed the number one social news organization is predicated on the idea that social media is the new news.

“Twitter is the new press scrum,” BuzzFeed’s social media editor told The Content Strategist. “It’s the place where news goes to break first.”

He’s not wrong.

The world of news has largely become intertwined with that of social media, so much so that Hayes said BuzzFeed readers come to the site — or, more appropriately, to its Twitter feed — with the intention of sharing media. The BuzzFeed staff curates viral content with the idea that such content is what people inherently want to read about.

“Basically we want to be a device for people to share news and content with friends,” Hayes said, “because that’s how people prefer to get their news these days.”

His work day involves trudging through social media and content on two computer screens, one dedicated exclusively to TweetDeck. Appropriately, BuzzFeed’s posts are short and sweet and made for sharing, not just driving people to the site (which at 25 million unique monthly visitors happens plenty anyway).

And BuzzFeed is growing. Since Hayes, a Fordham University communications graduate, began working there a year and a half ago, the staff has gone from 25 to 140. The editorial team — which like many news organizations also includes the social media editor — recently moved to a second floor in Buzz Feed’s Flat Iron office building.

That growth is partly from doing what readers want.

“People sign up for a social network because they want to be on that network,” Hayes, a 28-year-old Brooklyn resident, said. “They don’t want to constantly be sent away from Twitter.”

If news story breaks, BuzzFeed will often send out a slew of tweets immediately, before putting up a post. For traditionalists, this might sound like a media company scooping itself — but it’s really just finding what’s already on social media anyway and pushing it out to its audience.

That doesn’t mean BuzzFeed isn’t trying to drive traffic to its own site — it absolutely is, posting approximately 40 to 50 links to its site a day.

“Beyond that, we also do other stuff so people like us more on Twitter,” he said.

For Hayes, who formerly worked at a PR firm, that sometimes means no links to the site at all.

For example, when the space shuttle Enterprise flew over Manhattan in April, it seemed like everyone in New York City, including news organizations, was posting pictures of the shuttle as it crossed the city skyline.

To add to what was clearly a shared social moment, Hayes tweeted: “Retweet this if you ever wanted to be an astronaut.” It was retweeted nearly 900 times. What the retweets, in effect, show are what types of posts are popular — and as content strategists know, those are frequently articles that evoke an emotional response.

BuzzFeed espouses a Tweet first, post later mentality, to keep up with the ever-speedy news cycle. Such was the case the day of the Empire State Building shootings in August, when BuzzFeed sent out more than a dozen tweets before it even posted on its website.

“The news was breaking on Twitter, so it was important for us to be a part of that conversation so that we knew what was happening in real-time,” Hayes said.

After BuzzFeed’s post was up, Hayes continued to retweet people on the scene, news reports and even updates to the post. Writing about what is popular may seem backward to traditional journalists — as do many things about BuzzFeed.

A notable example of this was when a writer from Slate found that many of BuzzFeed’s highly popular lists, as well as some text, were taken from other sites without accreditation, (These posts have since been updated with sources.)

Hayes said Politico’s Ben Smith, who took the editorial helm at the start of the year, is bringing the organization in a more journalistic direction — which to Hayes is inseparable from social media.

Hayes was also quick to dismiss the sourcing controversy by referring to his ethos for tweets, saying that BuzzFeed has moved on.

“Twitter doesn’t want to be spit back to itself,” he said. “We’re looking for the next step in the conversation.”

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Last week’s Republican National Convention made it official: Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are the party’s presidential ticket.

Now that the Democrats’ convention is underway, The Content Strategist is taking the opportunity to assess last week’s Grand Old Party celebration’s content strategy — the good, bad and ugly — and, yes, including Clint Eastwood and his chair.

During three days of events, abridged by Hurricane Isaac, party leaders proclaimed their support for Romney and set out the content themes they hope will carry them into the White House.

Vary your content, but don’t go nuts

Good content is content people pay attention to. When you stop saying something new, your audience stops listening. As a way to counter a slew of speeches full of party platitudes and self-aggrandizement, the Romney camp decided to shake things up a bit.

It might have been a good instinct to invite Dirty Harry, aka actor and director Eastwood, to speak. It was an attempt to create varied, interesting content. Unfortunately, Eastwood’s now-famed 12-minute argument with a chair-as-Barack-Obama varied too far from the norm and was so interesting that it became downright strange.

The lesson is that while interesting is good, consistency and coherence can’t be sacrificed.

Evoke an emotional response

The RNC did provide some effective speeches, including those by Ann Romney, Marco Rubio and Condoleeza Rice — all of whom demographically represent problem areas in Romney’s campaign, namely women and minorities.

These speeches were clearly meant to humanize Romney, who has been criticized as being robotic and out-of-touch, as well as to soften the image of the Republican Party.

Theirs were definite standouts among the RNC speeches — unfortunately for the GOP they were outshone by Eastwood’s chair.

Even Romney himself did his part by opening up about personal life and family, although his speech was ranked, according to a Gallup poll, as the worst-received presidential nomination speech since Bob Dole’s in 1996.

Send a clear message

Themes abounded. The speeches evoked an idyllic American past, contrasted it with Obama’s failed presidency, and promised to restore “a better future” — the RNC’s official theme.

But as Maggie Haberman wrote in Politico, there was “no core message or cohesive vision that emerged from the 2012 convention, beyond the staggered themes for each night.”

Speakers discussed little in the way of concrete plans for how to create a better future outside of literary flourish. That won’t work for today’s political audience. People know when they’re being marketed to and they want a realistic plan.

Tell the truth

Rather than being touted as robust and personal, Ryan’s speech was overshadowed by its blatant inaccuracies. Instead of focusing on his fiscal policies or touting his youthful vigor, the media cycle stuck to the lies he wielded.

He accused Obama of threatening Medicare when his own economic plan would eviscerate it, and blamed Obama for an auto plant closure that happened before the president took office.

No one likes to be lied to. Whatever gains a lie creates will quickly disappear when the truth comes out. The only difference will be a loss of trust.

Be mindful of how others (the competition) will use your content

Perhaps the most electric residue of the convention, beside Eastwood and the chair, was an inspired response by Obama. It was definitely the most viral.

The morning after Eastwood’s “unique” performance art piece, Obama tweeted, to his more than 19 million followers, a photo of himself in the president’s chair with the caption “This seat’s taken.”

It now has more than 54,000 retweets and 21,000 favorites, making it the most popular tweet of the entire convention.

Obama came out ahead by addressing Eastwood’s attack with a sense of humor. He took the GOP’s content and made it his.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently

Presidential opinion polls are often tricky to understand because they rely on subjective measurements. Content strategist Marko Hurst believes gauging the candidates’ websites is less amorphous.

With enough data he says he can measure anything — including the effectiveness of presidential campaign content.

For this week’s Content Campaign ’12 Series installment, Hurst, a principal at strategic consulting firm Content Analytics, analyzed the health care sections of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney’s websites.

He compared the term “health care” because of its prominence in this election and because it’s not a branded term like ObamaCare or Medicare. In order to extract meaning from this comparison, Hurst ran a number of algorithms on open, third-party data available about the candidates’ sites, such as Quantcast to learn demographics and Google Trends to find online search trends

While Hurst uncovered a great deal from these exercises, the results can never compare to the discoveries possible using proprietary data, particularly the candidates’ own data measured against their personal strategies for their websites.

“If you have your own set of data, business intelligence, analytics, marketing, sales, etc,” Hurst said, “you can build out a full measurement program that can help an organization make data-informed decisions about content, user experience, research, ROI, budgeting, and more.”

Given what he was able to access in this situation, Hurst, who is the former content strategy director at Huge, was able to make a “baseline comparison” of the candidates’ relative success on multiple fronts, including page design, search engine optimization and audience.

We’ve included some of Hurst’s analyses below.

Page design

Obama:

Romney:

Winner: Romney

Using Attention Wizard and its eye-tracking algorithm, Hurst determined, with greater than 75 percent accuracy, where viewers’ eyes would go in the first five seconds of looking at these pages. Warmer colors show where viewers would pay more attention.

According to Hurst’s analysis, the main focal points on Obama’s page are on videos and images, with the warmest color currently on a little girl’s face — not the headlines or content. But without knowing completion rates — who is actually watching these videos all the way through —  you “can’t tell if Obama’s message is getting out there.”

Near the focal points on his health care page, Romney places data points about why his plan is better. Hurst says placing data points in these very visible areas is an effective way to get viewers to remember your message.

Search Engine Optimization

Obama:

Romney:

Winner: Obama

Overall both pages rated excellent (A+) for using best practices in search engine optimization, according to page reports by SEOmoz. Obama’s health care page comes up on the second page of a Google search for the term “health care.” Romney’s is on the fourth.

According to Hurst, for a non-branded term like health care, where there’s lots of competition from other websites, these page rankings are “very good.”

However, according to SEOmoz, Obama’s health care page ranks as the 139th top page on BarackObama.com, while Romney’s equivalent page ranks second on his main page.

Hurst said he couldn’t be certain of the reason without more data but said it could have to do with Obama’s site having multiple health care pages or different the candidates’ different audiences.

Audience

Obama:

                                       Romney:

Winner: It depends on the target audience

Hurst used Quantcast to measure the demographics of the candidates’ audiences, which it compared against the internet average demographics for North America. Obama’s website has much higher percentage of females and African Americans, whereas Romney’s dominates in the area of Caucasian males.

Perhaps surprisingly, considering how well Obama did with the youth vote in the last election, the number of younger people going to his site is below average.

But these are only findings the public can glean from readily available information. It pales in comparison to the revelations the campaigns can discover from mining the analytics on their sites.

The Content Strategist is a daily magazine for forward-thinking publishers and content marketers, sponsored and created by Contently