Universal Information Services

While the calendar may say that it’s late 2013 and not a particularly political time, the reality is that election season – or focusing on the next election cycle – never really ends. National political events and off-year state elections all feed into the all-day, every day news cycles and the churn of social media. Monitoring and measuring that news can never really end, and every city and town is just months away from the 2014 U.S. Congressional campaigns—from the most urban corner of Los Angeles to the wide-open spaces of Nebraska’s Panhandle.

Universal Information Services has a wealth of experience providing news monitoring for small, local campaigns and for political operations at the national/federal level. But whether the campaign is for the Denver Public Schools’ Board of Education, Chicago’s City Council, or a New York City congressional district, there are communication practices every political operation should consider.

The best politicians and campaigns look at the complete and total media landscape, understand the makeup of their area’s voters, and make informed decisions on how to allocate resources to best tell their story and explain their positions on issues. Some voters favor newspapers. A different kind of constituent may get most of their information from broadcast outlets or the web. Many areas of the country are demographically jumbled and no one communication vehicle can effectively tell a candidate’s story to everyone. Measuring media placement success—by using web, print, and broadcast new monitoring–goes hand-in-hand with polling to judge whether a political message is getting through.

And remember the cliche about all news being good news? Researchers from the University of Indiana quantified 500 million Tweets from Twitter prior to the congressional elections of 2010. They found a “highly significant” connection between the number of Tweets (positive, negative, or neutral) and the eventual congressional winner. The short version – the more people who are mentioning you (at least politically) the better off you are, according to the scientists. While others have criticized their findings, the takeaway message from the research is simple . . . if the public is talking about you they’re thinking about you. And very few people vote (or buy a product, take a service, etc.) from someone they don’t know. There’s business lesson in that, too.