UPDATE: This post originally said, based on a viewer-counter on the screen, that "attendance at the town hall of the future peaked at just fewer than 170 viewers." According to the Watson campaign, after some time to process, preliminary numbers out of UStream show that approximately 900 unique viewers stopped by the online town hall.
What I see is 176 total viewers...
Calm down Matt... calm down Phillip... I didn't see the "updated" numbers until just now... I'll take your word at the 900 number even though I can't independently see that anywhere on the ustream site...
Considering that there apparently were not very many peeps in the chat room, and the questions they did take seemed planted (link), I don't see that this ustream event was a particular success... face it, Bill White is just not an eyeball grabbing kind of guy...
I think one thing this does show is that even if 900 people tuned in it shows how shallow Bill White's bought and paid for social media supporters on Facebook are... if you haven't noticed he has been running advertisements full tilt and to my knowledge Rick has not run any of those advertisements...
What it also says is that while I will do an update and put forth new information as it comes in... the Burnt Orange peeps criticizing me won't (link)... on a very similar issue about Rick's online campaign announcement last year, reporters were using the Burnt Orange Report's false spin about the event... and neither the Burnt Orange Report nor biased reporters like Elise Hu went back to correct their flawed stories (link) based on guess work and liberal spin...
Burnt Orange Report is a joke. They are paid by big Democrat donors to sit around and blog.
ReplyDeleteHere is a screen shot that shows 13 total viewers after the "town hall" started.
ReplyDeletehttp://therightsideofaustin.wordpress.com/2010/07/13/if-a-liberal-trial-lawyer-holds-a-town-hall-does-anyone-care/
Actually you're both somewhat right. If you were getting the number from active users at any time during the broadcast, which is probably the case, you're right. The average is usually about a 15% of the total. A lot of people come into these virtual town halls and lurk then leave leading to the 1,277 number. 1,277 still pretty good for a virtual town hall. We experimented with two of them during the Castro campaign in San Antonio and saw some positive results. It's going to take some time for these to pick up but they are great interaction models.
ReplyDeleteTell Matt Glazer to get a job. Nah, he's seriously not a bad guy--but he needs to get a grown-up job eventually. Phillip Martin is a horrible person though.
ReplyDeleteLesson of the day: if a campaign spokesperson brags about 170 folks...and then doesn't correct the number (relies on conspiracy theorist bloggers to do so instead), that campaign should be laughed at.
Anonymous if you're the same person that posted at 5:08 I think you may have the numbers wrong with Matt. From what I saw he boasted about over 1,000 participants. That's valid (see my prior comment). With regards to some of the other numbers, it really depends on what you see when you go in. The way UStream works you'll see who's in the room at any given point, the number you and the author saw. Early in the cycle you're going to see low numbers. It builds with time.
ReplyDeleteBTW, I did offer some suggested ways to improve the broadcast based on our experience with Mayor Castro. Hopefully they'll listen to some others who have tried this before. We did three in 2009 with mixed results.
The bottom line is this was a good use of new media in a campaign. Was it better than Perry? I really don't care. I hope Perry does some of these also. I care more about the content in the town hall, which we all should be more focused on. Quibbling over numbers is childish in my mind.
You say quibbling, but it matters if you can't get 20 people to watch your town hall after pushing it out yourself in conjunction with every liberal blog in Texas. Also taking questions from Harold Cook is a joke. It proves that White has no grassroots support outside of Austin which mostly consists of UT students and Strama's summer camp.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous UStream has provided numbers showing an average over 150 concurrent viewers if you want to keep the quibbling up. All I'm saying is that the author of this blog is right on some numbers and Matt is right on other numbers.
ReplyDeleteIn the end, it's great to see new media used and I hope we see more. It's a great way to engage the voter and get the issues out regardless of the base. As I said, I hope Perry does the same thing even if it's within his base.