Election White Paper Summary - for those that don't have time to read the entire White Paper

1. Using the Internet as a Market Research Database A working example: Revelations of the UK Election 2010 An Onalytica White Paper Summary Joel Dalrymple and Orestis Chrysafis

2. Reading the World Wide Web – Information Overload If you could listen to and understand all of the conversations taking place on the internet, you could know everything that everyone is discussing. 2 However, this creates: © Langwitches

3. Reading the World Wide Web The scale of the internet makes it impossible to listen to and understand all of the noise. To learn from the collective discussions; sorting, categorisation and filtering is required to channel the noise into intelligence. New tools and techniques allow sampling of the internet so that it may be transformed into a usable database. In our White Paper, these tools have been applied to the discussions surrounding the UK Election, and in this PowerPoint, we share some findings from that paper. Some of these finding are unique to this dataset derived for the first time here, other findings show that the online world reflects the offline world. 3

4. Does Online Attention Reflect Real World? Attention is a scarce resource; those who don’t have it want it, and those who do have it want more. Attention is a necessary first step towards communicating a message. In politics as in business, the ability to communicate a message is highly sought after. Because attention is valuable, we hypothesise that people give attention to those things that they prefer. Therefore, performing analysis of Buzz enables a sound estimate of relative attention. 4 The sum total of all the discussions online is commonly called Buzz. Buzz is sometimes referred to as “User Generated Content” or simply “Word-of-Mouth”. How did Buzz compare with the polls?

6. an 8% increase in the polls for the Liberal Democrats

7. and a 4% increase in Labour’s share of the poll resultsSee ourWhite Paperfor more details.

8. Whose voice mattered most? 6 VS.

9. Who was influential? If one was to listen to all of the Buzz about the UK Election, they would hear a lot of duplicated content being passed from one person to the next. Imagine knowing, on an up-to the minute basis, where relevant information that people give the most attention to on a topic is generated. Measuring influence provides us with this information. 7 Who is influential differs by debate, few would trust ‘Top Gear’ as being definitive on wedding dresses; and few would turn to ‘Modern Bride’ for an authority on cars. Who is influential can shift over time.

10. Large media and the political parties dominated the debate: 8 The influence score is the best method available for measuring the relative weight of one source compared to another on a topic. For our study, the influence score is objectively measured from 6th April – 6th May using an input-output model. See the full White Paper for more details.

11. What about People Power? The potential influence of Social Media was heavily discussed in the lead-up to the election. There is also strong evidence that Social Media reflected the wider election debate, increased the speed and intensity of debate and, in some cases, was used effectively as a communication tool by candidates to engage with networks of local voters. However, the low influence measurement of the best known social media networks indicates that social media does not frequently generate discussion that is cited outside of those networks. Consistent with findings elsewhere, the content of the discussion is more typically generated by the larger media agencies. 9

12. 10 let’s look at just a few…..

13. How did the Lib Dem’s fare compared to Nick Clegg? The Lib Dem’s and Nick Clegg had the most varied campaign experience. In the following slides we will focus on some of the findings surrounding them. 11

14. Brand vs. Product Comparison Nick Clegg’s soaring popularity generated by inclusion in the first televised debate has been well documented. However, the success of the Clegg product did not translate into equal success for the Lib Dem brand. (See chart on previous slide) This discrepancy suggests that Nick Clegg was not tightly associated with his brand. Could this have been acted on? 12

15. How did the Lib Dem Share-of-Influence compare to Poll Results? Here we compare the Lib Dem’s Share-of-Influence (this is their share of the debate weighted by the influence scores as discussed above) to the next day polls. Labour and the Conservatives had a common interest in diminishing the Lib Dem’s appeal: increases in the Lib Dem share of discussion was highly correlated with losses in the share of polls for both. 13

16. What Impact did ‘Bigot-gate’ haveon the spotlight? Shifts in attention for any reason can represent a crisis for those losing the interest. When there is a shift – players should consider action. Following the second TV debate (22nd April), Nick Clegg’s share of the influential debate dropped from 34% to 25% over the week. The reason for the dramatic shift away from Nick Clegg can be understood by analysing the key issues being discussed. The key issue analysis shows that ‘bigot-gate’ was largely to blame. The ‘bigot-gate scandal’ generated a huge attention shift from Nick Clegg to Gordon Brown. To understand the extent of the bigot-gate impact, it is important to see the role it played in online discussions in comparison to other issues: 14

17. Sentiment Sentiment analysis aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to a topic. The attitude may be judgment, evaluation, or the intended emotional communication (that is to say, the emotional effect the author wishes to have on the reader). Sentiment is provided by InfluenceMonitor™ for every post collected. 15

18. Among the political parties, sentiment for Labour was the most negative. Prior to the first television debate, 28% of the influential Labour debate was ‘very negative’. The Conservatives maintained a consistent level of very negative sentiment throughout the entire election campaign. The Lib Dem’s had the least amount of very negative debate. 16 How much ‘very negative’ sentiment towards parties was there?

19. How did sentiment towards Gordon Brown trend? 17

20. Sentimentfor Gordon Brown Our results echo the massive unpopularity of Gordon Brown as found by the 2010 BES. Gordon Brown was discussed more frequently on ‘very negative’ pages. 29% of the pages discussing Gordon Brown had very negative sentiment scores compared to 24% for David Cameron and 20% for Nick Clegg. Sentiment towards Gordon Brown was a significant predictor of the party poll results. On average, a combined 10% increase in sentiment and Share-of-Influence resulted in roughly a 4.3% change in Labour’s share of the polls. 18

21. A Finger on the Pulse of Society The internet consists of information created by millions of users. In short, it contains a large sample of all information communicated amongst society. Listening to this communication means taking the pulse of society: knowing what people are saying, who is saying it, and knowing instantly. Applied to the election, InfluenceMonitor has shown that actionable information can be obtained at a relatively low cost. Before these tools, knowing what people are saying would have otherwise required time, resource and budget consuming surveys. If these tools had been used during the election by any of the players, proactive strategies might have been created to improve party performance. At present, it is not known if any of the political parties utilise the internet in this way. In future, it is likely that some form of internet study will be regularly performed by all of those interested in public opinion. As with any valuable technology, those who implement the tools first will obtain an advantage. 19

23. Provide services and solutions for answering valuable business questions based on the online debate – in real time

24. Customers are well-known brands from many industries: Software, Automotive, Communication Services, MarComms Agencies and UK Govt.

25. Contact us: +44 (0)207 407 7642 or www.onalytica.comAbout Onalytica