Shifting Demographics Cause Rapid Changes in Electorate – 2018 Primary Update

Posted on May 17, 2018May 17, 2018 by Alex M. Hochberger, MBA

Much was made in the 2016 election about the growth of the Hispanic voter. Minority voters are not evenly distributed in this country, and in metropolitan South Florida, that is readily apparent. Where we are based, Broward County, just north of Miami, became majority minority years ago, but the electorate is just catching up.

Primary Performance by Minorities Lags

White voters comprise 45% of the Broward County Electorate by registration. In November 2016, a Presidential election, turnout was up across the board, and White Voters were only 47.5% of the vote, slightly above their percentage of the electorate. However, in the August 2016 Primary, where most of the real decisions are made, White voters were 55% of the electorate. In the lower turnout primary (17% vs 72% in the general), the electorate is whiter and generally older.

This causes power to shift subtly, as county wide partisan races are nearly determined entirely in primaries, since Broward County generally votes for Democrats by a 2:1 margin over their Republican opponents. Judicial races, which are non-partisan, will be placed on the primary if there are two candidates instead of the general.

Demographic Trends are Clear, Pace is Delayed

Everything happening on a national scale is happening in Broward County, and it’s happening at the Primary level, just delayed 8 years. If you are campaigning in Broward Primary in 2018, you are facing an electorate with an ethic makeup that looks more similar to a 2010 general election electorate.

Hispanic Voters now turn-out in equal numbers to African Americans for the general election, about 1 point less than White Voters, but in the primary election, the turn-out rate is half that of non Hispanic Voters. This will result in a lower representation of Hispanic interests in judicial elections, since many of them will be determined before they turn to vote.

Trends within the Primary Electorate

Trends show that the white share of the electorate declining about 2.5% each election. It comes in fits and starts, but it is possible that 2018 will be majority, minority, but most likely in 2020 or 2022 we will see this shift in Broward County. This will change in 2018 if Hispanic voter turnout matches White and Black turnout, which would push the white vote under 50%, but most likely it will take a few more cycles.

Gender and Partisan Affiliation is more Constant

Party affiliate shows a slight decline in Republican voters in Broward County, but the pace could be flipped by a single election with an upturn in GOP voters.

Gender remains pretty constant at 55% Female – 45% Male.

Broward Politics Should Become More Diverse

The political establish of Broward may be slow to shift, but as the minority turnout increases each cycle in the primary season, the political leadership of Broward County should continue to shift. The Democratic Party will continue to dominate Broward County politics, but Black and Latino candidates will have a stronger reservoir of ethnically aligned voters in primary races, which should over time make our leadership more representative of the people.

Use Your Middle Initial(s) to Appear Intellectual

Posted on May 11, 2018May 11, 2018 by Alex M. Hochberger, MBA

Names impact people’s perception. Students whose first name begins with A or B have higher GPAs in school. Names “perceived to be white” get more call backs from resumes. Supposedly people with last names in the beginning or end of the alphabet engage differently in various impulse and scholastic behaviors. But those traits are outside of our control. Presenting your middle initial or not is 100% in your control. When researching likability and names, I found this study originally published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, The impact of middle names: Middle name initials enhance evaluations of intellectual performance.

Methodology of Studies

The full details are in the article, but they essentially ran a series of tests to see how people perceived the subject based on the presentation of the name. Subjects were asked to rate things from a scale of 1-7 from not-at-all to very much. The details varied in each test.

Evaluating Writing Performance

On a writing competence evaluation (study 1), those with middle initials had an average score of 5.62 instead of 4.92. The highest results were three middle initials (6.00) or a single middle initial, 5.80, while two middle initials was not significantly higher than none (5.05).

The fact that using three middle initials in ones name rased the score a full point out of 7 is pretty substantial, since it is costly. But the single middle initial was nearly as high.

Almost everyone has a middle initial, you should always publish using it, and I just added my Middle Initial to by blog and LinkedIn Profile.

Perceived Performance

We all want to be evaluated well in performance. Can something simple like your middle initial make a difference? In Study 3, they tested the perceived performance for intellectual pursuits and non-intellectual domains (athletic performance).

To evaluate this, the testers were asked which team they wanted to join, where Team A had more middle initials than team B. In the intellectual area, Team A won with 5.43 vs. 4.54 for Team B. In the athletic arena, there was nearly no change, and no statistical difference was inferred.

Perceived Status and middle Initials

Organizations perceived in higher intellectual status were expecting middle initials (study 2), which was reinforced in the performance study, but the more interesting branding question is your perceived status (study 4). The addition of middle initials raised the perceived status to 5.14, from the control group’s 2.99. If you want to be perceived as high status, use your middle initial.

Conclusion

I found the paper fascinating. But the primary business take-away, if you want to be perceived as high status or intellectual, use your middle initial. If you can do something extreme like use three middle initials, it may work better, but two middle initials seems counter productive.

Given the paucity of the 2/3 letter combinations in the 6 studies (it was only in study 1), I recommend that those wishing to be seen as high status or intellectual use their middle initial.

2018 Social Media Strategy Overview

Posted on April 30, 2018 by Alex M. Hochberger, MBA

There is no one side fits all strategy to Social Media, but ignore it at your risk. There are several major platforms and a plethora of minor platforms, but for small business brands and political brands, there are a few to focus on. Thank you to Pew Research for putting these facts together.

YouTube

YouTube, by reputation, is that of a video streaming service, but the YouTube.com site is a much broader social platform. Comments, discussions, sharing, and thumb up/thumb down scores all contribute to the YouTube experience. Sure you can embed a YouTube video on your website without using those functions, but YouTube.com is now the second largest search engine (after Google.com), and Google Video searches rely heavily on YouTube. A strong YouTube presence, including the social components of commenting on related videos and replying to comments, is very important. As of January 2018, 73% of Adults use YouTube.

Facebook

The largest of the pure Social Platforms, 68% of Americans have Facebook Accounts. Only Facebook knows what percentage of them are regular and active users, but Pew pegs it at 74% of American Facebook users use it at least once a day. That’s self reported, so take it with a grain of salt, but Facebook may be the easiest and most direct way to reach people. It is not sufficient to have a Page that you share content to. Links to your website, with proper boosts, and audience building campaigns are critical to brands having the ability to engage with people that interest them.

Instagram

Instagram, the Facebook property, is in third place with 35% of Americans having accounts, 60% of whom use it at least daily. That makes Instagram an important, but not as critical, part of your social media strategy. A simple Instagram account, with a regular picture and caption being added, with good hashtags, can go a long way towards building your brand. A serious effort to build followers and engage can have more serious results, but it depends on your brand. If your goal is to build deep relationships with users (premium luxury brands), Instagram should be front and center. If you need a more casual relationship with the bulk of the population (think politicians, Instagram can be more perfunctory).

Niche Platforms: Pinterest, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitter

These platforms, are relatively popular, all having a decent population, with dominance in their area, but lack a universal presence. The usage gap between these platforms and Instagram is only a few percentage points, but Instagram is rapidly growing and these niche platforms are relatively static in their user base. For completeness, Pinterest has 29% of Americans, Snapchat 27% of Americans, LinkedIn has 25%, and Twitter 24%. These aren’t small audiences, with large segments of the population in their niche.

Pinterest is very popular, but is demographic specific, being 81% female, and a median age of 40. The active pinners are younger and even more female, and among Millenials it equals Instagram. It has a strong advertising platform, and is very strong around lifestyle, hobbies, and brands. If you market your brands towards women under 50, Pinterest is a great addition to your platform. (OmniCore’s Pinterest Statistics)

Snapchat is popular, but niche. The advertising platform is immature, and it is challenging for non-celebrities to build a following here. Unless you are in fashion, music, or other youth targeted segments, it is probably more worthwhile to focus on other platforms. But if you are targeting college students and younger, SnapChat is essentials. (OmniCore’s Snapchat Statistics)

LinkedIn is a valuable, and expensive to market on. If your target audience are business professionals, it’s a critical platform. Sales Professionals live and die by LinkedIn. Gainfully employed people may only look at Linkedin when job hunting. If you are selling into corporate markets, LinkedIn needs to fit your platform. If you are marketing to consumers, LinkedIn is probably not going to generate an ROI.

Twitter is a super strange platform. It’s relatively small, but sometimes has an out-sized influence. It is popularly credited by the media with dominating the 2016 election, but there are so few people on it. It is more popular overseas, where the lower data needs and more free-flowing conversations avoid censors. Twitter is extremely possible with journalists, public relations firms, and celebrities. The ability to run the messaging from a cell phone makes it much flexible for those in the business of communicating with those industries. While Twitter shows Videos and Images, pure text messaging still works. If your business is looking to reach journalists, generate publicity, or communicate with customers in a free-wheeling fashion, Twitter should be part of your communications strategy. Twitter’s advertising tools are shockingly primitive, but it’s very powerful if you are trying to reach the demographics active there.

YouTube as Search Engine

Posted on April 27, 2018 by Alex M. Hochberger, MBA

YouTube is the Second Largest Search Engine.

People go straight to YouTube, looking for content. In addition, content on YouTube filters into Google Video Search and Google Video Results on the “All” results page, but YouTube searches themselves are increasingly valuable.

Is your Brand Utilizing YouTube Properly?

YouTube Channels Matter

You definitely need a YouTube Channel, and that Channel should be optimized on your name. When you are uploading videos, you want to make certain that people looking for you find your official page. (Yes you can create multiple YouTube Channels, but how and why you’d do that is a more advanced topic).

Your Name, images, description, all these things matter. Setting up your Brand Account is critical if you want to share access with others, or separate your professional and business life, and you can learn about Brand Accounts from Google, Manage your Brand Account.

YouTube Video Optimization Matters

If you are competing on a competitive generic phrase, you can spend endless hours working on learning SEO both on your website and on YouTube as a platform. For Basics, you want to focus on the core areas of ranking:

Use the Brand Keyword in the Title
Compelling Thumbnail and Title that encourages people to click on your video
Say Your Target Keyword (so it gets transcribed)
Invite people to comment and subscribe in the video
Ask People to Subscribe to the channel
Promote Your Video to get Views (on your Blog, on Twitter, in your Email Signature, everywhere)

YouTube Can and Will Drive Quality Traffic

YouTube gets people looking for entertainment and information. If your video offers either, it’s a great way to promote your brand, and a great way to engage with your customers, clients, and prospects.

Branding in Politics: All the Difference in the World

Posted on November 23, 2016 by Alex M. Hochberger, MBA

Retirement Savings is probably the most challenging economic issue facing the country. I presuppose that the issues with resolving the “crisis” are not political, but marketing.

Nataxis Global Asset Management commissioned a survey, and Time Magazine is reporting that 82% of Millennials support mandatory retirement plans and 75% support mandatory matching contributions.

Intuitively this makes sense, 82% of Boomers are counting on social security, but only 55% of Millennials think that social security will be there for them.

Interesting, if you ask people about expanding or cutting social security, according to Huffington Post, support for increasing social security reaches 70% among Millennials and 75% for Baby Boomers.

What does this mean:

Expanding Social Security is VERY Popular
Mandatory Retirement Savings in personal accounts is VERY Popular
Mandatory Retirement Matches is VERY Popular
Cutting Social Security is VERY Un-Popular

Notice a pattern here? Social Security is funded via a mandatory payroll tax on the employee and employer, a “match” if you will. The “optional” Bush Plan 10 years ago was super complex, was based on optional contributions to private accounts that would reduce benefits, and other confusing options.

What if instead the plan were phrased as:

Expanding Social Security with Mandatory Retirement Accounts
Employees and Employers would be required to contribute
The accounts would be private, and default to Treasury Bills
People could move their Social Security Investment Account to fiduciaries, or not, with limited investment options

That sounds economically, exactly like privatization. But every branding exercise would focus on expanding social security. Now sell your Social Security Expansion plan via Social Media, and you have a winner.

2016: Convergence of Social and SEO

Posted on November 22, 2016 by Alex M. Hochberger, MBA

The last few years have seen major changes in trends for Internet traffic. Social has exploded in importance, driving more traffic than search. How marketers adapt has been interesting.

Until this year, companies could run their social media and content marketing operations separately. Social media focused on brand engagement, content and SEO teams focused on driving eyeballs to the site. In 2015, Google and Twitter’s deal came to fruition. Additionally in 2015, Google’s Google+ Service got integrated as Google Local. In 2015, these were add-ons, throughout 2016, the integration moved to the core of the system.

So what changed in 2016?

Semantic Web Became Real
Mobile-Optimized HTML (AMP, Facebook Instant Pages)
Video Came of Age

The Semantic Web was of academic interest until it exploded with social in the past year. Open Graph and Twitter Cards became “must have” features as the social media networks gave prominence to links with content instead of merely including pictures. As sites were updating to support these additions to HTML, supporting the Semantic Web just made sense.

Mobile-Optimized HTML dealt with the reality that Mobile Responsive wasn’t enough, with increasing mobile bandwidth, slow speeds and high latency were an issue. Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages and Facebook Instant Pages have a shared core to deploy a cache-able stream-lined version of the website, feeding both social efforts and search efforts.

Every year has been the “year of video,” but 2016 really took off. YouTube’s social integration with Google+ and enhancement of their social features really pushed Video to the forefront. Pre-loading video on Facebook made including video critical to engagement, and the Video Advertising space heated up.

If you are still looking at SEO as something you should do (instead of building into your site structure) and Social Media as something else, you need to rethink that for 2017. In 2017, all methods of interaction are becoming unified, and you should plan to engage in SEO, Remarketing, and Social Media as a unified structure.

Semantic Web in SEO: Theory and Practice

Posted on July 12, 2015 by Alex M. Hochberger, MBA

Almost since the beginning of the web’s commercial birth, the limitations of HTML have been glaring. The “good enough” technology, the epitome of Worse is Better has been apparent with the web. HTML was never a great language for describing documents, XHTML was a disaster, and HTML5 is slow to come alive and clearly designed for committee… but it was good enough, worked well enough, and let business prosper. CSS took over a decade to come into wide-spread use, but the combination and simple-to-use Javascript has made it work.

Google’s “snippets,” and “break-out boxes” and “menu links” have all been efforts to figure out website and make it more useful for searchers. The growth of Schema.org and structured data and it’s role in web search has been both fun and fascinating.

For small businesses looking to promote themselves, the important area to pursue is Local Search. While Local Search does involve “Map Search” and “dropping pins,” providing regional content with appropriate markup can also yield big dividends. Creating a page targeting a city you work in, combined with a Review, a job/event you’ve done, and other aspects, all marked up with Metadata, can create a relevant piece of content to promote your business in that city.

Breadcrumbs have been a mainstay of navigating websites since Yahoo pioneered the practice, but their usage has fallen by the wayside. Single page sites, focus on shallow content (keeping all content at root level), and designers general aversion to breadcrumbs has been challenging them for years. Alternatively, sites that organize their content in an intelligent hierarchy, supply breadcrumbs, and tag those breadcrumbs with metadata might find their search results having an extra row with the breadcrumbs.

The return of deep content for long tail searches and breadcrumbs to manage them will help promote proper site design, information architecture, and deep content. If Google can promote this change by including an extra line in the search results, that’s a great use of using their power for good.

Usability, Content, and Calendaring

Posted on December 12, 2014 by Alex M. Hochberger, MBA

Over the past few years, SEO has become recognized as a critical component to a marketing campaign, instead of black magic ran by hackers. Building your website content around your keywords makes sense, and hopefully we’ve all moved beyond keyword oriented pages as we build out sites. Your keyword and brand should form the foundation of your site’s information architecture, but usability and a steady stream of good content need to form the core of your user experience.

Bing Blog has a great write-up for site management, “Usability, Content and Calendars: 3 Areas To Understand And Focus On”, with an overview of how to integrate these components. Content is straightforward, develop real, well written content, meant for human consumption. Usability is critical and often ignored, follow web conventions, make your site easy to learn and efficient for the user to get to where they want to go. Avoiding errors also means giving users meaningful responses to invalid entries. If the user leaves satisfied, you’ve done your job. Extra bonus, search engines like Bing and Google measure bounce rates and more advanced indicators to figure out if you’re making the user satisfied. If you optimize your site for robots and not people, the engines will knock you down for not satisfying them.

Calendaring is overlooked, and I’m guilty of that. When I launched this blog, I had an entry every week, and since then have abandoned and picked it up. A standard calendar of content creation is critical to keeping your content fresh and updated.

Including in your content, you can develop blog entries, but you also need to revisit your website content. Content should be updated regularly, not allowed to go out of date, and reflecting your current business. Out of date areas can aggravated, and if you alienate a Harvard Professor, a potential lawsuit, who attacked a Chinese Food Operation over a $4 discrepancy caused by an out of date menu.

Focus on your users, make your site usable, and have a regular content update calendar. With an up to date website filled with good, usable content, the traffic will flow. Your increased conversions will also help make your online advertising more effective. An organized website strategy that is integrated across channels will lead to success in all areas. There is no black magic anymore, but a little white magic never hurts.

Video Emails Triple Click Through Rates

Posted on July 27, 2011 by Alex M. Hochberger, MBA

One of the most important metrics for successful email campaigns in the click to open rate. Getting messages into the inbox is important, but you still need to get the recipient to open the email and then take action based upon it. The use of useful images has always generated a higher click rate, but now studies are showing that using video triples the click through rate of email campaigns.

Implix recommended that to embed video, include a thumbnail in the email with a clear play button, which invites people to click over to the website to view the video.

Marketing