Here in Michigan, with a state as large as ours, we had 1713 checkins as of 11:30pm. At first, that sounds great.
But then let’s contrast that with an estimated voter turnout of 3,800,000 Michiganders.
That’s 0.044% of the electorate who checked in. Not even a tenth of a percentage point of Michigan (or any state for that matter – I don’t mean to pick on Michigan, their turnout was better than much of the country) voters checked in. In some states, there were 200 or 300 people, total, who checked in to vote.
This gives me a lot of pause when recommending strategies. Sure, there’s different applications, different markets, people aren’t always political, etc.
But the total number of checkins across the whole state being the same amount as go through one decent-sized polling station?
This raises a LOT of questions in my mind, even though Foursquare is growing fast.
Sure, Foursquare has 2.4 million US users – but let’s look deeper.
If that’s true as an actionable number (something we can use), why is it that only 49,421 (as of 11:30pm election day) people checked in to vote? That means Foursquare voter turnout (within the userbase) would be about 2%. Sure, we’re lackadaisical in our country about voting, but our voter turnout rate (about 37% nationally last mid-term election, so we’ll use that number) is way higher than the foursquare user turnout of 2%.
If Foursquare reflected the country, you’d get a number along the lines of 37% of the total (which is the midterm election turnout last time around), which would then be represented in about 888,000 checkins across the country. Let’s give Foursquare the benefit of the doubt and base it off of young voter turnout – some estimate that between 20%-24% depending on who you talk to. Still, the numbers aren’t adding up – after all, not all foursquare users are under 30.
There’s just something not right; you’d think with how much the social media crowd talked about check-ins and Foursquare it’d be something of major importance you might need to throw major resources at – but the numbers show that is not true, at least right now.
Don’t get me wrong - location as a concept is very important, and will become more so. But I’m starting to think it won’t be in the context of the check-in, but in the enhanced delivery of information or in other ways.
Our semi-regular podcast called “Conversate” is glad to have a special guest this week, Megan Berry (
If you don’t know what Klout is, it’s a San Francisco based company who has a tool to help businesses and organizations find influencers and measure their influence online across 25 variables broken into three categories; True Reach, Amplification Score and Network Score. Over 450 partners such as CoTweet and Hootsuite utilize their data.
1. When a community is solid, it doesn’t matter who’s lead singer. And, in fact, the best lead singer is but a servant for the community. It’s not – and can’t be – all about them. The songs of Motown prove that. In the movie, Joan Osborne, Bootsy Collins, Ben Harper, Chaka Khan took the place of some legends like Martha Reeves and Marvin Gaye – it didn’t matter that it wasn’t the original singers. It felt real, because it was.
