GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY POLITICAL STUDY UTILIZES NEXTSTAGE FINDINGS

As part of a Political Data Mining project, George Mason University Researchers Philip Chau, Randall Ford, Michelle Guieb, Bryan Pierson and Bobby Singh recently unveiled an online report entitled ‘Political Party Websites and Structural Trends’ which ran an analysis of both Democratic and Republican party websites along with those for John Kerry and George Bush. The study's purpose was to determine how digital information affected the 2004 campaign process and how this approach might affect future campaigns. Apart from the official campaign sites, the researchers also used NextStage's TargetTrack™ results which were updated daily on the NextStage Analytics site to arrive at their findings. NextStage provided its TargetTrack™ analysis daily free of charge for public use for the entirety of the 2004 campaign. The TargetTrack™ analysis was the only non-political, non-partisan web analytics resource used in the George Mason study.

TargetTrack™, according to NextStage CRO Joseph Carrabis, is designed to identify the optimum target audience for digital media. Matt Van Wagner, CEO of search engine optimization firm FindMeFaster, attended a presentation Carrabis did at Rivier college and said, "NextStage's TargetTrack™ did something more dramatic than finding the best audience this time. It identified all the winners in the primary and national elections months before the results were in." Adam Smeltz, blogging from the 2004 Democratic National Convention for Knight Ridder called the NextStage Research, "For political junkies, a slice of heaven." and ClickZ New Media columnist Rob Graham called NextStage's postings "the closest thing to a political crystal ball I've ever seen."

The study's findings will be used to help future campaigns identify and address voter concerns more directly. By giving candidates the tools to quickly learn what voters are most concerned about, candidates can learn more quickly what those concerns are and then create messages and campaign materials to focus on addressing those issues.