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@BarackObama’s Lost Followers: A Tempest In A Twitter Teapot

by Rachel Sklar | 3:57 pm, July 30th, 2011

» 61 comments

Yesterday, President Barack Obama concluded his address to the nation by urging Americans to contact their representatives and urge action on a debt ceiling resolution. “If you want to see a bipartisan compromise — a bill that can pass both houses of Congress and that I can sign — let your members of Congress know,” said the President. “Make a phone call. Send an e-mail. Tweet. Keep the pressure on Washington, and we can get past this.”

With that, Tweeting officially became a political act.

To that end, the aides operating the @BarackObama account on Twitter began tweeting out the Twitter handles of GOP lawmakers. Starting with Alaska’s @LisaMurkowski and ending with Wyoming’s @CynthiaLummis, the account sent out 113 tweets from 12:42 to 5:49 p.m. yesterday. A dense but contained Twitter binge – but enough to exasperate over 35,000 people, who unfollowed the President’s twitter account — which now doubles as a 2012 re-election account, run by Obama’s 2010 campaign staff.

OH MY GOD HE LOST OVER 35,000 FOLLOWERS! WHAT WAS HE THINKING?!?

It’s probably a safe bet that he — or rather, his staff — were thinking “Let’s get some information out there to our giant network” not, “Yikes we’re going to lose a lot of followers.” So they did — and everyone is now gleefully schadenfreude-ing about it. But who cares? A little perspective is in order here:

The @BarackObama account currently has 9,367,217 Twitter followers. Yesterday it may have had over 9.4 million, but 30K is a tiny fraction of that. As @MelindaByerley pointed out on Twitter, “33k @BarackObama followers lost out of ~9m followers = unsubscribe rate of <.4%. Don’t see what the fuss is about.”

The “follower” metric is the wrong one here. The @BarackObama handle was looking specifically for action – for people to contact their reps, and, crucially, to reblast that message out so that *others* might contact those reps. In that respect, it was a total win. Raw followers is a bad metric, and one which I suspect we’ll see improved upon as 2012 antics on social media heat up — the holy grail is *engaged* followers.
The campaign may have lost followers, but it gained buzz: Per Adam Ostrow at Mashable, “according to NM Incite, the #compromise hashtag had been used more than 22,000 times and reached 36 million users (followers of accounts using the hashtag) as of around 5 p.m. ET on Friday, and people had mentioned the President some 28,000 times in tweets.” If you’re launching a time-sensitive Twitter campaign, that’s the kind of ROI you’re looking for. Also, bad press is good press: if the @BarackObama people had launched their Twitter list from a different, non-intrusive account, would we all be writing about it? Hearing about it? Probably not.
According to Klout, yesterday’s Twitter activity made @BarackObama even *more* influential, raising his Klout score by a full point (hard to do, as any would-be Klout-gamer will attest) and upping his Network Influence (the influence level of your engaged audience) and Amplification Probability (the likelihood that your content will be acted upon). It did show his True Reach dropping by about 12,000 – to about the level it had been at the day before. Again, some perspective.
Will he gain many of those followers back? Probably. Especially as the 2012 race starts to deepen and the alternative is Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney or Sarah Palin. This is why Obama can afford to play a little fast and loose with his base – he’s the best they’ve got. (“BO” stands not only for “Barack Obama” but also “Best Offer.”)
Even without any of these social media ROI metrics — again, who cares? There are things that are much more important. (Sorry, social media metric people, cover your eyes.) Yes, the @BarackObama Twitter account may have “overtweeted” (according to the generally-accepted best Twitter practices of those who don’t have a 9-million follower cushion) — but it was also transformed yesterday into a node for real-time communication on a national level. Yesterday’s tweet-binge amounted to using a real-time public information channel for, um, real-time public information. Shouldn’t that be the *real* ROI here?

Yes. It should. This whole silly brouhaha raises the question of “What is Twitter for?” Is it for sharing important information — or for jealously hoarding followers? For the President of the United States — and for anyone in government — it should always be the former. We’re all pretty jaded about Twitter now, but what we saw yesterday was something incredibly cool: a centralized communications hub sending out actionable information quickly, efficiently and measurably. That is pretty incredible, and we are certainly going to see more innovation in how Twitter and other social media is used to campaign and message as 2012 gears up. Yesterday’s @BarackObama tweet-spree actually pushed forward in a really cool way and provided yet another set of shoulders for future social media campaigns to stand atop of.

That’s it really. Metrics matter, but substance matters more. Even so, I hope the @BarackObama people tweet this out. That would be awesome for my Klout score.

*******************

(By the way, speaking of Twitter, as far as I am concerned this is a great example of how Twitter’s raw information-wrangling tools are woefully insufficient. Tweet-benders are not unusual — I’ve been on a few of my own! — and after five years Twitter should have a method of enabling followers to opt out of seeing that user in their tweetstream until the bender ends. Right now, Twitter’s only remedy for that is the harsh, punitive and inefficient remedy of the unfollow – harsh and punitive because it chills bursts of activity, however nobly inspired, and inefficient because it offers short-term relief via the long-term loss of following a useful person – the onus is on you to refollow. I tweeted earlier that this was a great use case for Siftee, an information-sorting Twitter client for power users, for which I am - disclaimer – an advisor. Siftee has a mute feature, where you can temporarily “mute” a tweeter from your stream; apparently UberSocial and TweetCaster have that feature as well. But why doesn’t Twitter?

And, taking it a step further, why doesn’t Twitter have an easy way to collect those 113 tweets, or even count them? Or break out tweets by day? A service like Storify is a great tool for people to collect and display curated tweets, but for grabbing a big batch it unfortunately falls short (I tried and then gave up, seeing how long it would take to go tweet by tweet.) I used Siftee’s tweet-tagging tool to collect the total tweets and get the posting times, and it listed the tweet-count automatically – but as of now, that is an internal tool that I unfortunately cannot publish. Someone will eventually collect and post a stand-alone version of those 113 tweets – after all, it’s a pretty great reference – but it won’t be me, at least until the tools for collecting, sorting and breaking out information on Twitter get better. Even making a Twitter list of all those GOP handles would be a completely laborious process. (I know, I know, that’s what Hill interns are for. But still.) As I said above, the metrics surrounding this information is important but let’s not forget about the information itself – as it stands right now, all those tweets are only available at twitter.com/barackobama, as individual items or as part of the larger whole. Now that Twitter’s made it so easy to create all this content, the next step should be making it easier to curate it. (Or, making it easier for third-party apps to curate it!) Because right now, easy it is not. End of rant.)

@BarackObama, barack obama, klout, Siftee, Social Media ROI, Storify, TweetCaster, twitter, UberSocial

Anonymous

And how about Obama’s all-time low approval rating in the Gallup poll this week? Is that a “tempest in a teapot”? And how about the ten percent drop in his support among independents in just the last month? And his collapsing support in key battleground states? All unimportant stories, hardly worth mentioning….
Anonymous

Maybe Anthony Weiner picked up those followers who dropped King Obama .
Anonymous

@BarackObama’s Lost Followers: A Tempest In A Twitter Teapot

Ya wanna talk about his LOST followers:

“Skids to all-time low in polls…”
“40% APPROVAL…”

One Term obozo – guaranteed!!!! Not that’s what I call LOST.
http://the-w.com/ CRZ

What I’VE learned from this story is that @BarackObama:twitter is more of an arm of their 2012 campaign than the president himself. (Lots of people probably figured this out before me, but I guess I don’t follow any of them. I never followed the @BarackObama account either.)

Also, they seem to use a URL shortener (ofa.bo) with a Bolivian domain. I guess it’s better than one from Libya. ;-)
Anonymous

Spin that story right boys! Another non-story making mountains out of molehills for attention. Notice there aren’t too many libtards crawling from the woodwork to sing praises to BOzo.

Wonder what would happen if BO was tweeted this message: “The time for putting yourself first is over. Stop Campaigning and do your job. We want a compromise NOW! Stop stalling and blaming. Get it done”–We The People
http://Twitter.com/Ed Ed

Sorry Rachel, 36,000 IS a significant number when you’re talking about the POTUS. I don’t expect unbiased journalism on Mediaite, but this story, and their obnoxious behavior yesterday was a perfect chance for you to show some balance.
Twitter has A LOT of bots, so 9M is not accurate.
36000 humans consciously unfollowing the US president, does matter.
It doesn’t matter to you because the “We refuse to be disillusioned club’ still follows. Who cares if Mashable linkbaits as though 36000 is Earth-shattering, they’re a cheap tabloid these days.☼ In reality, it’s disgusting that THE president, not the POTDems, is allowing the @ BarackObama account to be run by his reelection campaign. That should be separate.The young angry adolescents who fill the halls of the Whitehouse have NO business lecturing a population that has worked, contributed and sacrificed two and three times longer than they’ve been alive. I call out righty media https://twitter.com/#!/Ed/status/97047287473254401
and you’re just as wrong for spinning here.
http://twitter.com/rachelsklar rachelsklar

You’re right about the bots but I really don’t think 0.4% is significant – especially since, if you want to get technical, the unfollows were because of the spamming and not because of the message (I am making a generalization here because I don’t know the motivations of everyone, obviously.) I haven’t written for Mediaite for a while so I can’t be lumped in with the day-to-day of the site – I’m just looking at a rather clunky metric, and what a more sophisticated metric of ROI is (plus noting that Twitter needs to get more sophisticated, too). I do agree that it’s an eyebrow-raiser that the @BarackObama handle is now the 2012 handle – but then again, it’s his name, what he will use after he leaves the presidency. But you’re conflating a few things here that ought not be conflated.
http://twitter.com/Darr247 Darr Darr

37,000 out of 9,400,000 is less than four tenths of 1%. Most repugnant ones WISH they had 37,000 folowers.

President Obama still has over 10 times as many followers as Bachmann, Palin, Boehner, McConnell, Cantor and Limbaugh, COMBINED.
http://twitter.com/SailRabbits Magister

The account is labeled “campaign” and there’s a “2012″ on the avatar, so it’s clearly marked.

Thus far, if you scroll back past yesterday’s tweetstorm, the account has had something of a mixed use. There’s been retweets from state organizations, a few rah-rahs about policy and it looks like at least one tweet a day pointing toward an official event. As I touched upon in my comments to Mediaite’s news post on this subject, campaign accounts and campaign dollars have a lot more freedom than official functions, so it’s easier and more legal to mix-in governing on the campaign’s Twitter than to campaign via @WhiteHouse:twitter

Of course this first campaign is likely to have a steep learning curve. You’re an on-hand at the medium, but you didn’t draw the distinction; back during Weinergate, we saw that some people thought his personal account to be an official organ and some members of Congress have several Twitter accounts in an attempt to keep everything separate.
—

Otherwise, Rachel… nice pimp for Siftee toward the end. I’ll occasionally use Tweetdeck’s filter function to hush conference coverage, discussions, hashtag games and I can see how it could be used on a tweetdump. I’m not familiar with Siftee, but nice pimp.

Oh, and I’ve suggested Storify to Tommy at least once and I’ve probably said something in a comment. If you can get him and the others at Mediaite to beautify their tweet-based posts with any product, it’d be appreciated. (Jon’s excellent use of screenshots yesterday wouldn’t always work)
ImNotBlue

And if that doesn’t make him terrific, I don’t know what does!

Yeesh.
http://twitter.com/TheGrottoTweets Laurie Beth

Felix, if you don’t understand by now that this is a website that covers the media industry and not an actual news outlet that covers politics, I’m afraid there’s no way to dumb it down enough so that you’ll understand.

Excellent column on what is and is not relevant about Twitter stats, Rachel. Not that you needed to cement your status as a social media expert. ;-)
Anonymous

B.O.= Bend Over, take it like a man.
http://twitter.com/TheGrottoTweets Laurie Beth

Great post, Magister.
http://twitter.com/TheGrottoTweets Laurie Beth

Again, we’re talking about social media and the impact it has on political campaigns and our political system as a whole, not whether the president is “terrific.” Do try to keep up.
Anonymous

That looks like it might just actually work. Wow.

http://www.privacy-tools.no.tc
Anonymous

Wow, this is amazing! I had no idea Rachel still worked here.
Anonymous

“but what we saw yesterday was something incredibly cool: a centralized communications hub sending out actionable information quickly, efficiently and measurably.”Gee welcome to the internet age-Cool! Really ? Our President sounding a call for bi-partisanship, then his staff takes up the action to appeal to ONLY one side (democrats) to avalanche the other and crash their twitter accounts – real mature example of “bipartisanship”. Is Obama the president or a cheerleader/community activist? Is he active in the process or just trying to stir the pot? Whatever he is, it is not effective, nor does it exude leadership. He is a partisan president, who plays partisan politics and then appeals to everyone else to display bipartisan compromise. Do as I say, not as I do.
Anonymous

And yet he’s still kicking every Republican candidates butt for the next election. That’s really pathetic.

Obama’s been down before and he’ll come back again and again and again. But his bounce backs are non events because it really burns up his haters that they can’t touch him.
Anonymous

And yet he’s still kicking every Republican candidates butt for the next election. That’s really pathetic.

Obama’s been down before and he’ll come back again and again and again. But his bounce backs are non events because it really burns up his haters that they can’t touch him.
Anonymous

If they like unsolicited dick pics.
Anonymous

Wait, I am confused on July 11 Obama had only around 4.5 million followers- he gained almost another 5 million in 2 weeks!? Maybe that is why several journalists are looking into the inflated number (dare I say fake) number of Obama tweet followers? Can you explain the benefits to the WH to manipulate the metrics of social media to create their own version of reality?
http://twitter.com/AsilisArt AsilisArt

Spam
http://twitter.com/rachelsklar rachelsklar

I disclaimed!!! Great to hear from you Magister! Thanks for the tweet earlier.
http://twitter.com/rachelsklar rachelsklar

Rachel dabbles! Never far from the homestead. Thanks Pablo.
Anonymous

I want to start following the spoiled one, just so I can quit following him…
Nah, too much work.
Anonymous

So – he’s still an idiot.
Anonymous

Touche!
Jerry Baustian

About 12 days ago, President Obama went before the cameras for an address to the nation; even though it was only ten minutes or so, his popularity dropped from 47% before to 45% after.

Then on Friday a week ago, he held an impromptu news conference late in the afternoon; he was very angry throughout, and it was not a pretty sight. His Gallup daily poll numbers dropped to 43%.

In the middle of last week he went on the air during prime time. His daily poll numbers dropped to 41%.

And now he’s down to 40% — it seems as though every time he goes in front of the cameras he loses even more support.

Speaking as a Republican and as an opponent of the president, I hope he continues to give angry partisan speeches to the nation. At the rate he’s going, his poll numbers could be down near 30% by Labor Day.

At the same time, I hope he sends 200 or 500 or 1000 tweets a day to his loyal supporters.
Anonymous

Do keep in mind that all of his followers doesn’t mean that they are supporters.
Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer.
http://twitter.com/tahutch yosemite_sam

if you want to see a true idiot – look in the mirror!
BeeHOtheDickhole

F u dickhole-in-chief
Rustysh

“speaking as a republican” sums up obama’s problems quite well.
http://www.sarainitalyblog.blogspot.com/ sarainitaly

I don’t see the harm in pointing out that 35k+ members unfollowed him because of his spamming, especially because of what a lot of them were saying. They weren’t happy about the spam. But it isn’t a big deal, as Rachel pointed out, because most likely they followed him back the next day, and he has a lot of followers.

The bigger story, I think, is that they actually did that – spammed twitter, called for bipartisan compromise, and then flooded the offices of REPUBLICANS…. Not very bipartisan, there.

While this was newsworthy, it isn’t a big deal. Just like watching a clip of a movie wasn’t a big deal, yet that story generated tons of ridiculous coverage and idiotic outrage….
Anonymous

‘Post-partisan president’ my Ass. I hope the next 16 months are pure hell for Obamo. He’s been one giant lie machine and wrecking ball.
Droz

did any of those supporters contacting Republicans bother or have the intelligence to read the legislation, most likely not. Barack Obama is a pretty smart lawyer (lol). If he were my attorney I wouldnt let him practice law if he coerced me into doing something with no knowledge from my part or learning on the issue. Welcome to the moronic state of pop culture.
Droz

did any of those supporters contacting Republicans bother or have the intelligence to read the legislation, most likely not. Barack Obama is a pretty smart lawyer (lol). If he were my attorney I wouldnt let him practice law if he coerced me into doing something with no knowledge from my part or learning on the issue. Welcome to the moronic state of pop culture.
Anonymous

Obama thinks he was elected to act as the Justin Bieber of the White House. And he’s doing a damn good job of it.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_73WX644PUZQCJDMB7JMRT4PJHA Gumboz1953

The Tea Party republicans were elected in 2010 to bring “jobs jobs jobs.” And they’re doing a horrible job of it, too.
Howard

“Obama thinks he was elected to act as the Justin Bieber of the White House.”

Really? Could you point us to where he ever made that claim?
Exgoper

Thanks for demonstrating the intellectual level and maturity of the president’s detractors.
Anonymous

Laurie Beth, if you don’t understand by now that this is a website that covers stories beyond the media when it suits their agenda, I’m afraid there is no way to dumb it down enough so that you’ll understand.

Try reading through some previous articles to get a sense of what Mediaite covers and ignores. It will be a real thought-provoker — provided you have thoughts capable of provocation.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Dronetek-Bulk-Vanderhuge/100000918732763 Dronetek Bulk Vanderhuge

Meidiate damage control.
Victor Laszlo

Makes me laugh! Kinda like lefty hysteria over FOX NEWS!

2-4 million viewers of FOX everyday depending on the show and events.

310 million Americans - 3 million FOX viewers - about 1 %!

130 million voters in 2008 – 3 million FOX viewers – 2% of voters saw FOX!

Did FOX NEWS affect the outcome of the 2008 election?

How many viewers are watching for grins and not because they are seeking out FOX slant?

I guess if you need to be afraid of something, FOX is as good as anything!
Michelle

Speaking on the floor of the Senate Saturday, Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) said,
“If we had a billion dollars for every time I heard the words ‘Tea Party
extremist,’ we could solve this debt problem.”
Nuff said.
Anonymous

Do you even have a clue on how the government works?

Or an even better question, can you name the 3 branches of Government?
(Hint: if you have to Google for the answer and you see how Sen Chuck U. Schumer answered that question…keep looking further)
Anonymous

LOL,so true IMNOTBLUE….. A community organizer which has bamboozled college kids who have never had a job or paid a house payment and whose other twitter account is Jersey Shore and Lindsay Lohan… yeah Obama sure has his hand on the pulse of the nation!
http://twitter.com/BrandonLive Brandon Paddock

Right, because clearly a successful professional adult such as I would never support Obama. Except I have and do. Try again?
http://twitter.com/BarneyFranken Barney Frankenstein

Seriously? He’s the leader of the free world for God sakes. Of course he’s going to have a lot more followers. He SHOULD have alot more followers. What average person even knows who Cantor, McConnell and Boehner are?

Nice touch adding Rush Limbaugh by the way. What you failed to mention though that he doesn’t use twitter.

Stay classy, Darr Darr.
http://twitter.com/BarneyFranken Barney Frankenstein

Seriously? He’s the leader of the free world for God sakes. Of course he’s going to have a lot more followers. He SHOULD have alot more followers. What average person even knows who Cantor, McConnell and Boehner are?

Nice touch adding Rush Limbaugh by the way. What you failed to mention though that he doesn’t use twitter.

Stay classy, Darr Darr.
http://twitter.com/BarneyFranken Barney Frankenstein

Seriously? He’s the leader of the free world for God sakes. Of course he’s going to have a lot more followers. He SHOULD have alot more followers. What average person even knows who Cantor, McConnell and Boehner are?

Nice touch adding Rush Limbaugh by the way. What you failed to mention though is that he doesn’t use twitter.

Stay classy, Darr Darr.
Anonymous

It doesn’t matter, he’s finished.

He can’t escape the horrible, disastrous economy he owns now.

Tweety, Twitter, facebook, Myspace, Bookface, a billion followers, whatever.
Anonymous

“Actionable information?” He spammed the —- out of millions of adulators, supporters, bystanders, media, detractors, and anyone else who has an interest in following the President’s official Twitter feed with hundreds of meaningless posts.

“Incredibly cool?” Back in the 90s and early 00s, billion dollar fortunes were lost over aggressive spamming, but when Obama does it, it’s a new frontier for social media. Hack, hack, hack.
http://www.facebook.com/sootsme Ed Williams

Mr. President, and senators and representatives; I have your compromise: You and 98% of the rest of you DC clowns go down in flames in the 2012 election, and we the people elect folks that will enact something like Connie Mack’s plan that would cut 1% per year, starting at 2011 levels, and balance the budget in 8 years. Gosh, a one sentence plan that even a fourth grader can easily understand, that actually solves the problem. Obviously a non-starter in DC… Boehner’s deal: he ”got 98% of what he wanted”. Ok, assuming he is the political version of a suicide bomber, I guess… IF THIS IS SUCH A NEAT DEAL, WHY DOES IT PRESERVE THE STATUS QUO UNTIL AFTER THE ELECTION? DUH, folks…

“The government that would take 10% would be exceedingly oppressive.”- Ben Franklin

INCUMBENTS- THE “POLITICALLY CORRECT” ENDANGERED SPECIES!

REMEMBER IN NOVEMBER!
http://twitter.com/TheGrottoTweets Laurie Beth

Nice try, dear. It’s a media site, period. You’re a conspiracy theorist beyond all help.
http://twitter.com/TheGrottoTweets Laurie Beth

Nice try, dear. It’s a media site, period. You’re a conspiracy theorist beyond all help.
Guest

35,000 Americans is, roughly, the size of the city I live in. That’s a lot of voters!
http://wannabeanglican.blogspot.com/ wannabeanglican

I don’t think the numbers fully reflect the political damage from Obama now being a known spammer.
http://wannabeanglican.blogspot.com/ wannabeanglican

I don’t think the numbers fully reflect the political damage from Obama now being a known spammer.
Anonymous

At the end of the day it’s really not important that Obama lost and continues to lose tens of thousands of followers a day. What’s important is that Obama has lost the White House. I must suck to be between Barack and a hard place…lol
Anonymous

You are right and it’s roughly the number of people the Democrats have accused of being racist in the past 5 minutes too.
RDD

http://www.alternet.org/vision/151850/8_reasons_young_americans_don%27t_fight_back%3A_how_the_us_crushed_youth_resistance/
8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance
http://moneywatch.bnet.com/saving-money/news/6-ways-the-debt-deal-could-hurt-college-students/6271271/
6 ways the debt deal could hurt college students
Read more: http://moneywatch.bnet.com/saving-money/news/6-ways-the-debt-deal-could-hurt-college-students/6271271/#ixzz1U0ER1nv0