#realtime wedgies

[wedgme]

Huffington Post Canada Covers Ontario Election Debate With Poll

The campaign for Ontario Premier was a divided one and Huffington Post Canada covered it from start to finish. It was an election that was supposed to be Tim Hudak���s to lose. Everyone was surprised when Kathleen Wynne defied all predictions to become the first female Premier of Ontario.

It was especially surprising because she didn’t seem to fare well in the big election debate.

Huffington Post Canada created a perfectly timed poll to find out who their readers thought won the debate. Embedded on the homepage, it received over 20,000 votes and clearly showed their favorite.

Spoiler Alert: It wasn’t Premier Kathleen Wynne.

The Poll

Which Ontario leader won tonight's debate?

Created quickly with their Wedgies account, they added an image relevant to the question and used the custom options to match the poll with their brand.They easily chose the size of the embed, modified the information displayed, and changed the alignment to fit with the format of the article. After that, they used the auto-generated embed code to drop the poll into the article and published it to the front page.

Votes started pouring in right away, the totals climbing visibly in real time. No browser refresh required.

The Results

Readers thought Andrea Horwath won the debate by just over 7,000 votes with 60% of the total 20,050 votes.

Social sharing buttons in the poll generated over 400 incremental shares to social media, totaling nearly 600 shares for the article.

  Which Ontario leader won tonight's debate? http://t.co/FqjuhxqLOl @HuffPostCanada Horvath NDP won 62% of online poll! Wynne 25% Hudak 13%

— io media (@iomediavideos) June 4, 2014

Every click through these social shares drove traffic back to the Huffington Post article, adding to the page views and the number of votes on the poll.

The Election Outcome

Premier Kathleen Wynne took a lashing in the debate on $1.1 billion dollars of money wasted by her Liberal party that was driving up electricity costs across the province.

This issue made it easy for her opponents to capitalize on the debate, and was reflected in the results of this poll, but it wasn’t enough to secure the election for either of them.

Covering Your Elections

Polls and elections were made for each other. Now you have the power to pull in opinions through all of your publication’s channels—digital publishing, social media, and even on-air SMS polls.

While this poll only represented the opinion of Huffington Post Canada readers, it gave the publication vital insight into their readership, generated significant engagement, and brought in more pageviews.

Be prepared to consider the bias of your readers and hesitate to make IRL predictions from social poll results, but take advantage of modern tools to engage and learn from your audience.

It’s easy to do. Try creating and embedding a poll quickly right here.

[wedgme]

Wendell's had a pretty hard time figuring it out for himself, probably because he has tiny arms. Maybe you can lend him a hand.