Scott Walker may have been biggest winner at conservative conference

Scott Walker may have won the Conservative Political Action Conference after all.

David Catanese of U.S. News & World Report writes that according to “a measurement of media impact by GOP consulting firm The Gage Group and social analytics company General Sentiment,” the Wisconsin governor had the event’s biggest “media value share.” He got a 25 percent share, followed by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s 23 percent.

The data were compiled from “combing Twitter, Facebook, news websites, blogs, comment sections and forum postings for candidate names and associated hashtags and keywords, and assigning a value to all of the mentions on a scale determined by sentiment.”

Here’s how it works, according to Catanese:

“Each media mention is assigned a dollar value, and the more positive the coverage, the higher dollar value it receives. The idea, says GOP targeter Alex Gage, is to measure a brand’s reach and place a hard number on the overall level of exposure a candidate gets over a given time frame. In shorthand, he refers to it as a candidate’s ‘kindling’ effect.”

CPAC took a straw poll, and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., won. Walker was second, and Bush was fifth.

But Catanese wrote that any buzz around Paul “was trumped by Walker and even Bush.”

This story was originally published March 3, 2015 at 5:01 PM with the headline "Scott Walker may have been biggest winner at conservative conference."