In The Spirit of The Season...

  Hello folks, yet another week has passed us by and in doing so has reminded me that it is time again for another post about social media.  Unlike my past two posts I'd like to dedicate this post to the concept of big brother.
  In this fashion I discovered this article.  If you don't care to read it I will certainly summarize.  In short a team from Compass Labs conducted a study of Facebook pages to analyze the difference between Republican and Democrat voters.  Now this idea is not new, studies have been done and published since the publishing of The American Voter in 1960.  However, it is one of the recent studies that has used social media as a primary source for data.
  But the question still remains "what did they find out?"
  Well for one, both Democrats and Republicans think 'The Hangover' was a great movie.  But on perhaps a more influential level, the study illustrated a breakdown of voters beyond their personal habits.  For example: Obama is flying high with over 28.3 million likes on his Facebook fan-page, while Romney is struggling to maintain just 6.4 million.  While at the same time Compass Labs found that the engagement ration for both were 52% for Romney and just 11% for Obama.
  Now I can agree that this use of social media to collect social data is an intelligent idea.  This issue I have with it is how reliable of a source it is.  First of all it is wonderful that I know that Republicans typically like to shop at Walmart and Democrats enjoy playing video games.  Secondly, I can glean that the most effective way to reach my voter base may not be through Facebook or in Walmart.  However, most importantly this tell me that the American citizen is now publicly offering their personal information that 40 years ago I would have to go door to door, or cold call, to discover.
  If Compass Labs can use Facebook to find all this information... what could Google do with it?