Jonah Seiger, founder and managing partner of Connections Media, worked on the election campaigns for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in both 2005 and 2009, including oversight of the campaign’s entire digital media program for the most recent election. Seiger spoke at a Social Media Week 2010 panel titled Bloomberg for Mayor 2009 Web & Social Media Summary, and his comments, summarized by David Cohen for MediaBistro’s WebNewser offer a case study of how much impact social media can have in a political campaign.
Bloomberg won the social media campaign by a wide margin, totaling more than 40,000 Facebook friends and Twitter followers compared with 6,300 for the challenger.
According to Seiger, 42% of traffic to the official campaign site was generated from social media and search-engine optimization. Some additional numbers: 224,000 YouTube video plays; almost 400 different online ads created during the course of the campaign; and a total of 31 million Twitter followers of Bloomberg Twitter followers, with 3.5 million of them in New York City.
Seiger’s “estimated” impact of social media: 85,000 votes–in an election where the final margin of victory was slightly more than 50,000 votes.
