Social Media Benefited Bloomberg Campaign. Maybe.

As part of the Social Media Week events taking place in New York City, a leader of Mayor Bloomberg‘s re-election marketing team spoke about the online advertising and social media used by the 2009 campaign.

Jonah Seiger is the Managing Partner of Connections Media LLC, the vendor that provided the interactive media program for the 2009 re-election campaign. Using a lot of assumptions, but pretty straightforward math, he figures that his company’s social media efforts brought somewhere between 37,000 and 90,000 people to actually vote for the Mayor. If accurate, this is significant because the final disparity between Mayor Bloomberg and his opponent, Bill Thompson, was close to 50,000, votes according to Seiger.

“Every tactic that we deployed mattered in the outcome. I don’t think social media mattered more than everything else, but it definitely mattered,” said Seiger.

Overall, the 2009 Bloomberg campaign secured 1.1 billion online impressions with a cost per impression of .02 cents. The analytics show that 42% of the traffic to the website came from social media and SEO during the campaign, but it is hard to tell for sure what those people did on election day. What is for sure is that as of this writing, Mayor Bloomberg has 15,839 followers on Twitter and 25,775 fans on Facebook.