techPresident - data - Comments

Ad Age on Facebook

Jim Crumley — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 09:51:21 -0400

Ad Age has an interesting article today on the value of self-reported data on Facebook. It asks the question, "are people telling the truth about their age, etc. in their profiles?" Based solely on your data, I personally think they are. Or at least they aren't lying so much and so deliberately that it makes a big difference at this point. Tastes in bands and tv shows will definitely change and people will normalize their cultural preferences to "fit in". But the basic demographics in your spreadsheet I think are good. They make sense and sometimes that's all you have go on. The only real way to know is to test. If an ad campaign tailored to conservatives works, then the data is good enough.

Ruffini is calling the kettle black on website inaccuracies

stephenfox — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 22:43:45 -0400

I am baffled by just one thing in Patrick Ruffini's commentary.
I must say at the onset that I read his reportage religiously, several times a day, on most of the new stories and blog comments on Bill Richardson, my choice for President, and Ruffini's grasp of the breadth of kinds of articles is almost alway top knotch.

Except for just one small fact: Ruffini still lists ex-Iowa Governor Vilsack as one of the Democratic candidates, even though he has withdrawn many months ago, and even despite the fact that I sent Mr. Ruffini 4 emails to that effect to remind him that Vilsack had quit, but to no avail....

Thus, it seems a bit hypocritical for Mr. Ruffini to blast the outgoing Brownback for his lack of internet attention, when Mr. Ruffini seems to have paid little attention to his own website on this change in candidates, or to his own fan's emails reminding him to correct his own website.

Agree

Jim Crumley — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 12:27:40 -0400

I agree. 18-24 year olds are notoriously difficult to market to directly because they don't yet have the credit, voting or consumer histories that their parents do. Facebook could easily be a better media choice for colleges, distance learning centers and other marketers who must really zero in on this market segment. I would imagine that as Facebook grows any direct marketer will be able to overlay their own cutomer/constituent model over Facebook's users and then they are off to the races. And the value of self-reported data depends on how it is collected. It is usually more reliable than inferred/modeled data and thus more expensive to collect and rent.

Good points

Patrick Ruffini — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 04:02:10 -0400

That's right. I'm not sure Facebook is replacing big data vendors like Acxiom any time soon. But you could argue that this is a nice supplement to that data for the younger demographic, who tend not to consume content online and not subscribe to magazines that would make them a data point for the big commercial firms. Plus, I would imagine this is a better guide to cross-referencing media consumption patterns (favorite TV shows, movies, books) than most commercial vendors.

I also think we need to get away from the idea that self-reported data is bad data. If someone cares enough to self-report an interest in your product, that's the kind of customer you want. I'd think you'd want to profile those people moreso than folks who give the right answer when prompted.

Cool find

Luigi Montanez — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 23:19:32 -0400

This is a great find, thanks for sharing. A free database of millions of users' self-identified political leanings and interests/affiliations is pretty amazing.

But I'll echo some of the words of caution above. First, this data is most useful for understanding the Facebook-using population, which skews more liberal, educated, affluent, younger, and tech-savvy than the rest of the population as you noted in your previous post. So any data gleaned should be interpreted with those facts in mind, or normalized appropriately.

Second, the simple results aren't all that interesting outside of the context of placing ad buys. Of course more conservatives will like Garth Brooks and football, and more liberals will like the West Wing and be vegetarian. Where the real value will come from is when/if this raw data gets put into a data warehouse and goes through more sophisticated mining techniques. That's where the unexpected, "gee I hadn't thought of that" data will come from. But as mentioned above, if money is going to be invested in such an undertaking, better to use the already existing consumer data providers like Choicepoint, instead of self-identified data from Facebook. Also, Facebook knows the tremendous value of mining their data (they certainly do it already) for their own advertising deals, and would never expose such sophisticated tools to the public.

Good data but let's not get too carried away.

Jim Crumley — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 22:44:01 -0400

This data is excellent and certainly light years ahead of what was available before from social networking sites. However, "the greatest microtargeting engine ever built" might be a bit optimistic. Almost all, if not all of these market segments can already be found on the market. I don't think it's in Facebook's strategic plans to compete with the credit bureaus and other monster data compilers who build models based on thousands of data points for each and every household in America.

Notes

thegreathal — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 20:58:52 -0400

1. Are libertarians excluded, or just grouped with another constituency?

2. Should you be tracking the number of conservatives vs. liberals overall on Facebook, or proportionately versus each other?

--Hal Levy / studentsforkucinich.com

Interesting stuff!

edmondthehun — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 12:13:53 -0400

As a stats junkie I will definitely be playing with this stuff... looks like conservatives favor Switchfoot and Lifehouse by about 2-to-1 margins and liberals favor Rihanna and Jay-Z by about 2-to-1 margins. I'll have to come back to this.

Notes about the data

Fred Stutzman — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:13:57 -0400

As you note, this is self-reported data; therefore, it excludes vast parts of the Facebook demographic that chooses not to report their political affiliation. I'd challenge that this data is generalizable on that basis - yet this is still very interesting.

About political self-reporting - One's political affiliation is one of the most polarizing elements of the Facebook profile. In studies of Facebook profiles, we see that users tend to highlight and emphasize common elements - fostering norms and openness. Declaring political affiliation doesn't necessarily polarize, but there are a vast many Facebook users who put their openness to friendships before their ideology. This is obviously systematic.

What you see still poses an interesting question - why do we see this liberalizing trend among self-reporters? A network analytic approach might reveal tighter clusters among liberal-identified users; this in turn might identify that reporting liberal affiliation is a norm in these tight groups. Another explanation might be the general negative attitude towards "conservatism" as represented by President Bush. It might be interesting to correlate this data with his approval ratings.

Very interesting stuff - thank you for putting it together.

What about Libertarians?

edmondthehun — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 14:52:52 -0400

Very interesting data and analysis. However, I keep finding more friends on Facebook that identify themselves politically as Libertarian, the only choice besides "Apathetic" on Facebook's "Political Views" that does not fall in the typical range between "Very Liberal" and "Very Conservative." Libertarians are reported to have a larger presence on the Web anyway. Do you have any numbers and demographic analysis for that category?

Also, Facebook allows you to distinguish between "Very Liberal" or just "Liberal," and likewise for conservative. I assume the Lib and Cons numbers in the spreadsheet include both of each, respectively. If you have access to that distinction, are there any interesting demographic trends for those who identify themselves more strongly to one or the other, or is it about the same or not worth mentioning?

Regardless, I look forward to your future in-depth analysis.

Good observations

Jim Crumley — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 13:22:58 -0400

This is good stuff and correlates to a customer profile I did a couple of years ago for a telecom brand. Early adopters tended to be more liberal in social outlooks and consumer decision making, i.e. hybrid cars, environmentally friendly products, choice of reading matter etc. It's interesting to see that conclusion backed up by different research from a social network site.

Jim Crumley
Trio Strategies

Excellent Work

jedidiah — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 10:48:41 -0400

Thanks for doing this and thanks for the spreadsheet! This was a great read. I'll be marinating on this for a while and I look forward to your next reports on these data.