Just in time for the Iowa Caucuses, Google launched an election page—or rather relaunched as it reserves space on its webpage every two years for the political cycle. This year’s page has been updated to reflect current social media and search trends. Besides the usual rundown of news, tools for activists and political campaign data, the site also has a Trends Dashboard, which compares candidates’ YouTube video views, search traffic and Google News mentions.
The graphs are currently empty, as of the Jan. 4 at least, because there is not enough data, Google explains. That will most surely change, and soon too.
Social Media as Political Pundit
As these bars fill up, it will be interesting to see how prescient they are. There is a good reason to think that they will be just as telling as the countless number of polls and surveys that political consultants will take between now and the November elections.
Iowa Caucuses
A strong, positive correlation has been found between overall social media performance and voting intention amongst Iowans, according to Sociagility, which applied its brand-focused PRINT algorithm to front-running Republican candidates and compared its data with polling data from Public Policy Polling.
In fact, the strong correlation between social media performance and voting intention amongst Iowans (0.83 out of a possible 1.0 maximum) was almost matched by the correlation (0.82) between a candidate’s PRINT score for Facebook and national voting intention.
Midterm Elections and Facebook
Social media's predictive powers were highlighted in the last election as well. Facebook claimed that its fans predicted more than 70% of key races based on their "likes". It tracked 98 of the most hotly contested House races; of these 74% of the candidates with the most Facebook fans won their races.
It also found that over 82% of the 34 Senate races that have been decided were won by the candidate with more Facebook fans.
Riots, Migrations and Other Events
Other predictive applications of social media range from the intelligence community to Wall Street to the entertainment industry.
Last year, the Intelligence Advanced Research Project launched its so-called Open Source Indicators Program to mine social media data to predict such events as protests, riots, terrorist attacks, political and humanitarian crisis, mass violence, mass migrations, disease outbreaks, economic instability, resource shortages and responses to natural disasters.
Marshall Toplansky, president of WiseWindow, told Information Week that his firm analyzed social media chatter for country music group Lady Antebellum for EMI and found the best predictions from the volume of mentions of the group's originality and discussions of concert dates.
Wall Street firms are also using this approach to predict financial market trends, Toplansky said.
In 2010 Fast Company reported on the work two researchers at HP Labs were doing, using Tweets to predict how well a movie will do. The accuracy rate, Fast Company reported, was startling, topping the Hollywood Stock Exchange.
