By all accounts, Madness! 2012 has been a success so far. Thank you all for making it so!
Now it’s time to kick it up a notch.
In Round 1, we averaged 154 votes per poetry pairing. Not bad! But I think that we can collectively do an even better job of getting these great poems in front of more teachers, parents, and kids.
“How?” you ask? (Cool — I can make you ask anything I want just by typing it!)
The above chart overlays vote count with the number of Facebook shares and tweets that I recorded for each matchup post. The correlation screams out at you. SHARING = VOTES. Look at that matchup between Greg Pincus and Dave Crawley (4-wired vs. 13-falsetto). It was shared on Facebook 186 times and tweeted 29 times, and as a result had far and away the highest vote total of Round 1, with 449 votes. The story is the same elsewhere.
To better understand the exact relationship, I ran a few variables (# facebook shares, # tweets, and poll end time) through a simple linear regression model to see what popped out as drivers of higher vote totals:
Poll end time proved an insignificant variable. Though more time would obviously equal more votes, it is not as significant as either Facebook shares or tweets.
So I removed that, and ran the model with only Facebook shares and tweets. No contest — tweeting, while much appreciated(!), has no meaningful statistical effect when compared to Facebook.
So … here is your mission, whether or not you wish to accept it: SHARE THE MADNESS ON FACEBOOK! Every time that you share a link to a Madness! 2012 poll on Facebook, it generates +2 votes for that poll. And that finding is significant at the 99.9999999999% level.
The Round 2, Flight 1 polls that closed last night averaged 192 votes each, which is a 24% improvement over Round 1. That’s great, but I think there are more than 192 people in the world who love kids’ poetry …
Don’t you?
-Ed
