Obama - President in Peril?? Part 2

I am going to follow up my previous post yesterday with the goal of answering another question.  If President Obama's Brand Passion is so low and he lives in "danger zone", how does he compare to the "front-runners"?

This is always a great question.  And one I figured I would tackle to give more context to the President's position in social media.  Just to level set for those who didn't read my previous blog post (here is a link if you want to), I have re-posted the charts below.

These charts help give a relative view comparing brands.  The first compares the President's Brand Passion (see previous post) over time.  The second focuses on giving a comparative view of how the Barack Obama brand compares to a variety of disparate brands.  The goal is to help "see" how President Obama benchmarks with other types of brands. 

Today, I wanted to follow to ask the following...if President Obama's brand sits in a very negative sentiment place only a mixed amount of passion, what does this mean about his re-election?

Rather than look at the entire field, I created a Brand Passion Index focused only on the top three Republican front runners (Herman Cain, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney) to see how he directly compares to his challenge upcoming in 2012.  I also included Hillary Clinton just for the fun of it.  I also threw in Chris Christie to see what people believe they lost with him not running for President.

Below is the Election 2012 Brand Passion Index.  Let's take a look...

To me...this is interesting.  Yesterday, I called my post A President in Peril.  While this is certainly true, if we look at the field we do see some interesting things.  For one, President Obama has much significantly higher level of buzz than anyone else.  The  only one who comes close is Mitt Romney.  Everyone else is really small potatoes from a traffic standpoint.  Below is a buzz comparison of those on the chart above...

You can quickly see that the President has a significantly greater amount of buzz that the field.  This gives you some additional context.  It also tells you that he will be trying to steer a much rougher river if he wants to "change" how people feel about him.  I would go as far to say as there are forces at work that must organically improve (housing, economy, unemployment anyone) to move such a loud voice in the right direction.  On the other hand, the Republican field can still shape its voice.  This is where the danger lies.  The story is not told by them yet.  They can create their message and we can watch how it takes hold.

As for the BPI, I believe what is the most interesting part of this analysis today is that no one is really that great.  While the other candidates do have better sentiment, their passion is pretty weak.  Let's look at Mitt Romney.  What we hear about him is what we see on the BPI.  He isn't very inspiring and is slowly marching his way to mediocre candidacy.  The flavor of the week Herman Cain.  He fairs the best and actually creeps into positive sentiment territory, but again the passion is low.  Chris Christie, the savior of the Republican field.  Not really.  He has way lower buzz (which means the story is yet to be told) but he is pretty similar to Obama.  In essence, no one really has the upper hand.  Everyone is in a wait and see mode with this field.  Even Hilary Clinton (while better than Obama) is not significant either.  But like her Republican counterparts she has a decent amount of buzz that could be shaped over time as well.

We have a President who is mired in negativity (which we can look at next) and a field of republicans that doesn't inspire anyone.  To really understand the nuance, we will have to dig deeper.

Much deeper.  Coming to you from the sanctity of my computer as a one man gang who is analyzing the 2012 race in under 4 hours so far...until next time...

Oh yeah,  the beauty of social media is you can do it yourself and "get up to speed on a topic" very quickly and easily and in any direction.