If you are like me even though you don’t live in the United States you have been anxiously following the American elections. After all, the policies that are dictated in United States, and especially the foreign policies, are echo through-out the world. Also, as a Liberal I am abhorred by what is going on with United States right now, the deterioration of their middle-class is in my opinion a national – dare I say global crisis. Lower disposable income for Americans can affect many countries that are involved in heavy trade with them; definitely not good for us Canadians.
During the past week I have been following the speeches in both Democrat & Republican national conventions and I have to say I thought the caliber of speeches, delivery, and just the excitement in the air that existed during the DNC was head and shoulders above what was happening at RNC. Now I might have a biased opinion do to my left-wing political leanings, so when I found some hard data confirming what I felt I was very excited and wanted to share this with you guys. A company out of Cambridge Massachusetts called Bluefin that specializes in social-TV analytics has been tracking the social-media response to both of the telecasts, here are some very interesting results:
via Ad-Age
via Ad-Age
Bluefin tracked social media response to the campaigns via Twitter and public Facebook posts. As you can see the numbers speak for themselves, the Democratic convention reached 5 million comments during 4.5 hours spread over three nights – about 2.5 times the comments the Republican convention got based on the same amount of time. In fact, the last night of the DNC with speeches by Vice President Joe Biden and President Barak Obama was the most socially charged night of the entire 2012 political season, reaching 2.5 million social-media comments in a 90 minute time span. According to Mike Guigli of Bluefin, that one specific night was more social than all three nights of the GOP convention. As time goes on and social-media meshes even more with our daily lives, it would interesting to see how well can pre-election social-media response/engagement and sentiment analysis predict the outcome of an election. I am aware that perhaps right now the active social-media user demographics favours the Democrats, taking into account age and education level (Ops! did I say that? Yes I did!), but as time goes on and we all become fully connected the data will become more reliable. As for this election, lets hope that results seen above translate into the voting booths and the American middle-class gets a chance to shine once more!
[Source: Ad Age]
Right Up My Ali 