Gray Dudek

Ok, quite a taboo topic but there’s a good point to be made here.

With Facebook as we know you can view Profiles, Pages, etc quite easily by clicking and going to them.  Straight forward.

However, to get the new content streamed live into your news feed which you can access on your PDA, etc you have to become a Friend or Fan.

So here’s my point…

The Government are jumping up and down because 12,000 people have signed up to this, let’s call it,  ‘tribute page’ for Raoul Mout saying that they are disgusted with the support he is getting.

Let’s look at this from traditional point of view. When Fred West tortured all those girls and boys and hid them in horrific places did the Government step in and say that everyone who bought the Sun, News of the World, etc on the following weeks were disgusting people and should know better as West was simply a murderer, no.

Now, sure there are a few people who are posting comments that are not quite cricket but in the main there are more Fans/Friends of the Page (not Raoul Moat) than there are contributors.

My guess would be that a number of people are signing up to this page to get the latest (albeit a little tasteless) news from the page to watch what is happening. Sad but true however Red Tops have been selling tasteless trash for years and nobody ever really questions it.

I could be wrong and all 12,000 could be sick individuals we should hunt down and lock-up however I do get the feeling the Government once again is not quite understanding the channel properly and how it is consumed.

Take Nestle as an example, when people were signing up left, right and centre the other month they were not signing up because they ‘loved’ Nestle and wanted to be Friends and Fans in the truest sense of the words, they were signing up to watch the action unfold as    and Nestle argued online. Thus demonstrating my point.

Just because you have a received a ‘Friend’ or ‘Fan’ as Facebook call them don’t be fooled into thinking they are 100% tha because the aforementioned categories are merely naming conventions not indications of intent!

And David Cameron, you’re right it is sick that a few people post pointless crap online but don’t tar everyone with the same brush just because the rest of us are morbidly interested in these idiots…

Hey your campaign team did it all this year and look where that got you!

On the 15th April 2010 a UK first happened where we saw the 3 main political party leaders engage in a live TV debate – much like US guys have been doing for many years.

While the debate had 70 or so ‘rules’ that the leaders had to abide by it has to be said that the debate lived up to it’s billing drawing in a huge audience of nearly 10million people doubling the size of the usual ITV audience.

So, if nearly 10million people watched the debate what did they think?

We used Social Radar to find out.

First stop was to look at the volume of conversations, be they on Twitter, blogs, forums, etc that each of the leaders and parties attracted over the coming days.

It is very evident from the above chart that the dominance of Nick Clegg and his approach to the debate has catalysed online conversation around him as the leader of the Liberal Democrats and also his party. Surprisingly David Cameron managed to gain more conversation online than Gordon Brown but as always was this conversation of a positive or negative persuasion?

As we can see from the above chart the online conversation volume around David Cameron, whilst being larger in volume than the other two leaders, was almost 20% more negative towards him and the Conservative party proving that in this scenario more is definitely not better. Amazingly Nick Clegg steals a sentiment score of or around 75% positive which, to his credit, seemed quite deserved from the way in which he came across on the night.

We then took a look so see what the major topics were that people were aligning with the Leaders Debate over the following 48hrs.

We cross tabbed the most popular terms / words being used in the discussions with sentiment to achieve a holistic view on how the debate was received in general but also to see what the most discussed themes were and whether these were agreeable with the audience or not.

The Leaders Debate was received very well indeed across Twitter as a general theme. Nick Clegg, as we know, was received very positively and was discussed frequently. However, David Cameron as the most discussed topic, second only to the actual debate itself, was simply received well. Diving deeper into this area we were able to see that the online public just did not understand the position he took on the night, didn’t like the way in which he seemed to be ‘buddying up’ with Nick Clegg (Hung Parliment springs to mind!) and overall his Angry Dad persona was just not liked.

So, over the coming weeks I will continue to monitor the Leader Debates and report back the top-line findings from Social Radar as the debacle unfolds…