Can we Predict the Result of a Referendum by Looking at Online Presence?

Original Published on SEOMoz

Use of online marketing is proving more and more important in the political sphere as well as in business. In the 2009 American general election we saw social media used properly for the first time by a presidential candidate, Barak Obama. It is perhaps telling that a lot of post mortem analysis has focused on how well he used social media and how that helped to get him elected – there has even been a book published about it.

Now that we have seen how useful a good digital marketing strategy is in hindsight, the question that has now crossed my mind is whether we can use online presence to predict the result of a referendum. Here in the UK we’re about to have a pretty important referendum on whether on no to use the Alternative Voting (AV) system. Over on SEOMoz you can find my predictions on who may win this referendum based purely on how well each camp is using online marketing techniques. Who do I think it will be? You’ll have to head over to SEOMoz to find out

Update: It seems as though the prediction was correct. While online marketing is obviously not the only indicator in cases like these, it does seem that it can be used as a predictor. This was quite a clear victory for one side, so it may be interesting to follow this experiment up with another based on a more tightly fought campaign.