Getting personal: The future of communications
@neilwholey
Getting personal:
The future of
communications
Neil Wholey – LGinsight
and Head of Research and
Customer Insight at
Westminster City Council
@neilwholey
23rd May 2013
Getting personal: The future of communications
@neilwholey
23rd May 2013
Accuracy of opinion polls
http://thefutureplace.type
pad.com/the_future_plac
e/2010/07/the-1936-uspresidential-electionthings-all-researchersshould-know-1.html
•1936 Presidential Election candidate Alf
Landon
• Literary Digest magazine predicted in their
poll that he would would win 57% of the vote
against FDR
• Sent out 10 million postal „ballots‟ and
received over 2 million replies “Any sane
person cannot escape the implication of such a
gigantic sampling”
• The sample of 10 million was biased towards
the wealthy; Literary Digest subscribers,
owners of cars and telephones
• George Gallup used a carefully selected
sample of 50,000 voters and predicted the
election to within 1% of the final result and
many of his techniques still underpin modern
polling
Getting personal: The future of communications
@neilwholey
23rd May 2013
Times change
“As Americans’ modes of communication change, the techniques that
produce the most accurate polls seems to be changing... a number of
polling firms that conduct their surveys online had strong results. Some
telephone polls also performed well. But others, especially those that called
only landlines or took other methodological shortcuts, performed poorly
and showed a more Republican-leaning electorate than the one that actually
turned out....
...one-third of Americans who rely exclusively on cellphones tend to be
younger, more urban, worse off financially and more likely to be black or
Hispanic than the broader group of voters, all characteristics that correlate with
Democratic voting.....
The final poll conducted by Google Consumer Surveys had Mr. Obama ahead in
the national popular vote by 2.3 percentage points – very close to his actual
margin, which was 2.6 percentage points based on ballots counted through
Saturday morning.....perhaps it won’t be long before Google, not Gallup, is
the most trusted name in polling.”
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-polls-fared-best-and-worst-in-the-2012-presidential-race/
Getting personal: The future of communications
@neilwholey
23rd May 2013
NYTimes: Accuracy of opinion polls
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-polls-fared-best-and-worst-in-the-2012-presidential-race/
Getting personal: The future of communications
@neilwholey
23rd May 2013
Time Magazine, 7 November 2012: http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-datacrunchers-who-helped-obama-win/
Getting personal: The future of communications
@neilwholey
23rd May 2013
So what did they do?
• Outcome
• helped Obama raise $1 billion
• remade the process of targeting TV ads
• created detailed models of swing-state voters to increase
effectiveness of everything from phone calls and door knocks to
direct mailings and social media
• Tools
• One big database
• Own data + bought in commercial data + web/social media
tracking
• Data-mining experiments to predict the degree to which individuals
could be persuaded (and what would persuade them)
• Dozens of metric-driven e-mail campaigns each day
Getting personal: The future of communications
@neilwholey
23rd May 2013
Many of the e-mails sent to supporters were just tests, with
different subject lines, senders and messages. Inside the
campaign, there were office pools on which combination
would raise the most money, and often the pools got it wrong.
Michelle Obama‟s e-mails performed best in the spring, and
at times, campaign boss Messina performed better than Vice
President Joe Biden.
In many cases, the top performers raised 10 times as much
money for the campaign as the underperformers.
http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-datacrunchers-who-helped-obama-win/#ixzz2DRNTVPmb
Getting personal: The future of communications
@neilwholey
23rd May 2013
It‟s another sign that the role of the campaign pros in
Washington who make decisions on hunches and
experience is rapidly dwindling, being replaced by the work
of quants and computer coders who can crack massive data
sets for insight.
As one official put it, the time of “guys sitting in a back room
smoking cigars, saying „We always buy 60 Minutes‟” is over.
In politics, the era of big data has arrived.
http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-anddata-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/#ixzz2DRNqHuh8
Getting personal: The future of communications
23rd May 2013
@neilwholey
Best way to reach people?
Q. Thinking about the ways which the council can give you information,
which do you think are the best ways to reach you personally?
52%
Email
47%
Personal letter
Council publication/magazines
35%
Council websites
26%
T.V.
16%
Local newspapers
15%
Social media
National newspapers
12%
9%
Source: 500 Westminster residents 16+ interviewed by telephone March 2012 by telephone
Getting personal: The future of communications
@neilwholey
23rd May 2013
This session is therefore about...
• Is “getting personal” the future of communications? What
should I be doing as a comms professional to up my game?
What trends should I be aware of?
• How technically can we engage more with our public –
what are the tools we should be considering? This isn‟t just
about Big Data there is more going on
• Not so much about social media as I‟m far more excited
by the role of email, other communication channels,
hyperlocal media – and how to co-ordinate activity. It plays
a role but isn‟t everything. If you don‟t agree you can berate
me over lunch or on Twitter @neilwholey