Head Tale

Just before the Sask NDP leadership campaign started, I compared a variety of social media metrics for each of the potential candidates.

Now that we’re a couple months into things, I thought I’d revisit this idea but with a twist.

Instead of looking up all of the numbers (and how they’ve changed) for each candidate across Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc. etc. etc., I thought I’d use one simple measure that, in the age of “Gangnam Style” getting 600 million views is as much a measure of viral reach as Facebook, Twitter or any other traditional social networks.

I thought I’d look at the most recent YouTube video released by each campaign, when it was released and how many views it has to see what kind of viral reach the campaigns are having online.

As always, this isn’t a perfect measure – three of the four candidates released very campaign-oriented videos recently but Trent Wotherspoon’s latest clip on his Trent4Leader YouTube channel is of him speaking about Remembrance Day in the Legislature. That one only has 41 views as I type this compared to his last campaign-related one where he announced his Education Policy which only has 17 views even though it was released three weeks ago.

So maybe it’s better to use the more recent one on this list anyhow even though it wasn’t really campaign specific?

On second thought, the lack of views for Trent’s last couple videos may be an accident of timing as much as anything. So I’m going to bend my rule and focus on the last “major” video Trent released just to make things a bit more equal.

So how do each of their most recent (and/or most campaign focused recent videos) videos stack up?

Cam Broten -“The Go-To Guy I Trust More Than Anybody” – 185 views (3 weeks ago)

Ryan Meili – “Better Together: Ryan Meili for Sask NDP Leader” – 314 views (2 days ago)

Erin Weir – “The Sask Party Can’t Stop Talking About Erin Weir” – 179 views (6 days ago)

Trent Wotherspoon – “Trent Wotherspoon, Forward Together – Join Team Trent” – 623 views (1 month ago)

So what, if anything, do these numbers tell us?

Well, for one thing, I think it reinforces what we already knew – the Meili & Weir camps are both running campaigns which have much more of a social media component than the Broten & Wotherspoon campaigns. (Slight aside – maybe its because they’re both sitting MLA’s but I keep wanting to think that Cam and Trent are the two oldest candidates in the race and attribute findings like this to that. Except that’s not true at all – Weir is indeed the youngest but I think Meili is actually the oldest candidate in the race.)

My post on Monday opened up a bit of a hornet’s nest but I’ll double-down on the points I made by saying the lack of focus on social media from Wotherspoon and Broten reinforces my argument that those two, more than the others, are most representative of the status quo rather than embracing change and doing things in a new way.