#ReformParty meets #Headtalker

Thanks to everyone who participated in the Choose Darcy Headtalker campaign!

At noon today, 53 people (actually, 53 social media accounts -- each account is treated as a different person, I've noticed) told more than 1.2 million friends/followers/connections:

@ReformParty: Revive Ross Perot's Reform Party -- nominate Darcy Richardson for president!

In the four hours since then, those social media messages have produced more than 200 visits to Darcy's campaign web site. Presumably that number will increase. The analytics are a little primitive, but it looks to me like the traffic produced has just plateaued in the last hour or so. My guess is that it will decrease fairly quickly and that 12-24 hours from now we'll have seen the last of it. But I wouldn't be surprised to hit 500 visits when it's all said and done.

This last four days has been a strange form of political campaign. Its aim is to demonstrate to nine voting delegates, who will choose the Reform Party's presidential nominee between now and next Monday, that one campaign is both serious about, and capable of, promoting the Reform Party itself.

Darcy gave me a campaign budget of $50 and permission to experiment. I personally set today as the campaign's end date -- if we haven't made our point by now, we won't, and that gives the delegates four days to cogitate.

With that $50, I:

• Showed the Reform Party (through the lens of Darcy's campaign) to more than 4,000 people via Google Adwords, with a click thru rate to the campaign web site of about 1/2 of 1% (not terrible for Internet advertising).
• Showed the Reform Party (through the lens of Darcy's campaign) to about 1,600 people via Twitter advertising, with a click thru rate of 2.78% (toward the top of the normal range for Twitter ads according to some of my research).
• Deployed about 100,000 468x60 banner ad impressions (through various services) to show the Reform Party (through the lens of Darcy's campaign), as best I can tell, about 50,000 times so far (the ads will probably run out over the next few days -- they're the only part of this campaign that continues beyond now). It's hard to gauge the number of unique viewers, but it's safe to say that banner advertising is pretty dead as an effective reach tool -- the click-thru rate tops out at about 1/10th of 1%.
• Showed the Reform Party (through the lens of Darcy's campaign) to more than 1.2 million people via Headtalker. Click-thru rate to be determined, but I expect that more people will visit Darcy's campaign web site in the 24 hour period starting at noon today than voted for the Reform Party's  presidential ticket in 2008.

So, Reform Party delegates, once again I ask:

Take a look at your web site hits. Which candidate is sending people your way today?

Take a look at social media chatter about the Reform Party. What's inspiring it today?

How do those numbers compare to a normal day?

Darcy Richardson is serious about rebuilding the Reform Party. Are you?