The recent mayoral race in Calgary saw three frontrunners break away from the pack of over a dozen candidates: Naheed Nenshi, Barb Higgins and Ric McIver. Traditional news media polls reported this as a close 3-way race and a record high voter turnout was expected.

The real ‘story behind the story’ was taking place online. Taking a quick look at the numbers, there’s an obvious and direct relationship between the three candidates’ social media rankings and the total votes they received.

Of course, this doesn’t represent a 1-to-1 ratio of social media followers to voters and certainly many of those that voted in the election didn’t visit any of the candidates’ facebook pages or follow their twitter feeds. But the nature of peer to peer influencing and this strong example show how social media plants the seeds that not only helps spread the message but can accurately predict behaviour and preferences of a given group. In this case, that group was eligible Calgary voters.

In agriculture we can’t lose sight of the power of sowing these social media seeds today. The full reach of this type peer to peer influencing can be difficult to quantify directly, but the ultimate results are irrefutable.