Twittering Iowa
by Patrick Ruffini :: December 19th, 2007 2:23 pmCan the Internet do a better job at covering election night than the media? We are about to find out.
I would like to launch an experiment with Twitter on Iowa Caucus night. If you’re caucusing in Iowa on January 3rd, sign up for Twitter, make sure you have the mobile feature turned on for the night, and send a Twitter a text message with your caucus location and the results in 140 characters or less. If possible, please send your message from inside the caucus location as the vote totals are being announced. Make sure your tweet contains the word “caucus” or is prefixed “@IowaCaucus” so we’ll pick it up at the account we have designated for this purpose. We’ll be tabulating the results and providing a real-time tally of our totals in the Republican and Democratic Caucuses.
What do I hope to accomplish with this?
For the Republicans, this will provide real time reporting of raw vote results. The GOP event is a relatively straightforward affair with a single round of balloting, so we will know the results relatively early in the evening. This will enable us to test the accuracy of a distributed reporting system like this, and hopefully beat the media to the buzzer with pre-official results.
For the Democrats, we’re hoping to get several different layers of reporting from Caucus attendees. We want the results of the first, pre-viability ballot. We want anecdotal reports of who Dodd, Biden, and Richardson supporters are switching to, and the tactics that the Clinton, Obama, and Edwards campaigns are using the flip people. And we want the results of subsequent ballots. We’ll be aggregating these data points and publishing as the night goes on, bringing a level of transparency to the caucus process that we’ve never seen before.
Follow @IowaCaucus on Twitter to receive these updates in real time. If you are an Iowa resident attending the caucuses, send a tweet to @IowaCaucus or a direct message, and we will automatically “follow” you to ensure your report is received. Give us some sense of who you are. We don’t mind partisan supporters of different candidates reporting in, so long as the information is accurate. But if you turn out to be an Obama county chair and you report an improbably high Obama number, we reserve the right not to use it.
This should be an interesting experiment in how social media can impact politics in a state not known as a haven for early adopters. At most, we’d probably need a few dozen Twitter reporters in both parties to make this worthwhile. That’s not a high hurdle to clear when the end goal is better information about the most anticipated political event in the last three years.
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Great idea… I’m following now.
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[…] Patrick Ruffini :: Twittering Iowa (tags: 2008 ia technology) […]
[…] Twittering Iowa […]
[…] @iowacaucus. Patrick Ruffini on Twitter has set up a resource that will send directly to your Twitter account (and, by proxy, your mobile phone) updates he finds on the web on polling numbers, as well as other tweets from the Twittersphere containing the keyword “caucus”. To be included in his coverage in Iowa, simply tweet what’s going on using the keyword, or simply follow the account to get the coverage. Go here for more information. […]
[…] Twittering Iowa - innovative thinking by Patrick Ruffini Posted on January 2, 2008 by tomaltman Patrick Ruffini blogged on Dec. 19th that he was shaking things up a bit - “Twittering Iowa“ I would like to launch an experiment with Twitter on Iowa Caucus night. If you’re caucusing in Iowa on January 3rd, sign up for Twitter, make sure you have the mobile feature turned on for the night, and send a Twitter a text message with your caucus location and the results in 140 characters or less. If possible, please send your message from inside the caucus location as the vote totals are being announced. Make sure your tweet contains the word “caucus” or is prefixed “@IowaCaucus” so we’ll pick it up at the account we have designated for this purpose. We’ll be tabulating the results and providing a real-time tally of our totals in the Republican and Democratic Caucuses. […]
[…] I found this post over on Mashable, discussing the best places on the web to get coverage from Iowa. This post discusses a really interesting experiment that someone is doing to determine if Twitter can actually perform better than the media in covering Iowa. It certainly is possible. I plan on following this Twitter feed, tonight… although I can see how this may become a completely disorganized mess. This seems like great information. But, it needs some order. […]
[…] A blogger called Patrick Ruffini is holding an experiment to see if Twitter can do a better job of offering coverage of the caucuses than the traditional mainstream media. He is asking Iowa voters in the various voting districts to send in Twitter updates with their mobile phones with the prefix @IowaCaucus. This prefix will ensure that the Twitter messages get collected together and if you subscribe to the Twitter page with Google Talk then the results will come directly to you as they happen. Kind of a new twist on “breaking news”. […]
[…] Twitter and Scoops Patrick Ruffini’s Twitter efforts once again proved that using Twitter for major event coverage will give you a substantial lead over anything the mainstream news can do with their efforts, and for substantially less money invested. I got the following Facebook message from him a bit ago: Based on my informal count, about 20 Twitter users were positioned at caucuses throughout the state reporting results, with more reporting in through email and text messages. Thanks to these early tweets, very early on, we were able to see a strong reservoir of support for Barack Obama that it was clear would be difficult for Clinton and Edwards to overcome. […]
[…] Why does citizen journalism work? According to Mark, primarily because a guy using Twitter was able to predict a big win for Obama before the mainstream media and because Mark was “without even turning on any cable news networks…able to get minute by minute coverage of the caucus results from actual primary sources with a high degree of accuracy and interesting analysis.” […]
[…] Twitter and Scoops Patrick Ruffini’s Twitter efforts once again proved that using Twitter for major event coverage will give you a substantial lead over anything the mainstream news can do with their efforts, and for substantially less money invested. I got the following Facebook message from him a bit ago: Based on my informal count, about 20 Twitter users were positioned at caucuses throughout the state reporting results, with more reporting in through email and text messages. Thanks to these early tweets, very early on, we were able to see a strong reservoir of support for Barack Obama that it was clear would be difficult for Clinton and Edwards to overcome. […]
[…] In case you read, yesterday, I blogged about how someone was using Twitter to see if he could predict the results of Iowa quicker than the media. Turns out that this little experiment faired pretty well. Shortly before 7:30, he was able to conclude that… Based on my informal count, about 20 Twitter users were positioned at caucuses throughout the state reporting results, with more reporting in through email and text messages. Thanks to these early tweets, very early on, we were able to see a strong reservoir of support for Barack Obama that it was clear would be difficult for Clinton and Edwards to overcome. […]
[…] Phil Ayres notes that social media microblogging tool Twitter helped a blogger predict the Iowa results before the mainstream media: Finally, a use for Twitter. I have been trying to get into it. But, I am just not finding it to be very effective - because, hardly any of my friends do it. It would be like owning a fax machine with nobody to fax to. Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
[…] Il 19 dicembre Patrick Ruffini ha creato un apposito account e ha spiegato l’esperimento proposto a partire dal suo blog e, in seguito, su quello di TechPresident e su un gruppo creato su Facebook, altro popolarissimo social network americano. […]
[…] Jeremiah Owyang is a huge Internet celebrity on the west coast. He’s a researcher at Forrester who writes about Social Media. Last weekend, he conducted a Twitter experiment where Twitterers would tweet their ratings of Super Bowl commercials. It was a cute experiment, but also a bit lame after Patrick Ruffini’s amazing Iowa Caucus Twitter experiment. Using a Twitter account, he was able to call Iowa for Barack Obama way before the mainstream media had any idea what was going on. It was an unqualified success. […]