Elections, social media and sentiment

Over the past few months during the federal election campaign I was working on a project called ABC Campaign Pulse which was looking for interesting ways to visualise trends and sentiment over the period the election campaign.

After seeing the prominence of social media and data visualisation in the UK election in April and May of 2010 we wanted to see what we could do in an Australian context. We wanted to find ways to filter the noise on social media and make it meaningful and interesting through visual tools and analysis. The project was initiated and conceived by Jess Martin (@gourjess) and Ping Lo (@pinglo) and produced by me and Angela Stegel (@angelastengel) all from the Strategic Development team in ABC Innovation. We also worked in collaboration with ABC News and built the modules to be reusable on other sites across the ABC, for example the ABC Local sites ran the Leaders Today module as part of their sites.

Here is are some screen shots and video demo of the site (and embarrassing voice over)

ABC Campaign Pulse demo from Monique Potts on Vimeo.

Some of the more interesting modules were the Twitter Trends and Hot or Not modules. The Twitter Trends module used a tool called Trendsmap licensed from Stateless Systems was tracking real time twitter trends and chat about the election and overlaying it on a map of Australia based on the origin of the tweets. You could drill down into individual tweet streams for each term and also see how trends changed over the period of the campaign.

The Hot or Not module was trying out sentiment analysis on the 3 leaders and coming up with an aggregate sentiment score for each leader every day. We worked with a company called memery in Brisbane who used a tool called Dialogix to review 10,000 comments and streams overnight from online news articles, blogs, forums, Facebook comments and Twitter reviewed sentiment on each one using natural language analysis. From this it came up with an aggregate sentiment score for each leader each day.

The technology seems to be still pretty much in it's infancy and it couldn't pick up on a lot of the sarcasm and irony which Australians tend to like to use in relation to our political representatives, so we had quite a lot of false positives and negatives. That said it was pretty popular with the audience and pulling in some of the most influential (people with the most followers) positive and negative tweets under each leader certainly added an entertaining element to the site. We were hoping to have it dynamic but ended having to pre-moderate for editorial reasons.




Other election sites I liked are BuzzElection site where you can track election issue discussion by time, state, most influential people etc


ElectionWIRe by VibeWire

Connecting Up presentation

Attached is presentation about ABC and social media, web 2.0 given at Connecting Up conference for nonprofit sector in Brighton Le Sands yesterday

Twitter feed is at #cua09

http://www.slideshare.net/moniquep/abc-and-web-20-1427202

Social media and the changing concept of privacy

The increased use of social media such as blogs, ugc and social networking over the past 5 years have created changes in people's perceptions of what is private and public information. Increasingly online public spaces are used for personal media and personal opinions and musings.

When I told a friend recently that I had 'reworked' my blog and taken out all the more private references to children and 'personal' issues like being a mum and work/life balance (or the impossibility of such as thing) she said she thought I should keep these posts in. I think like a lot of people my first attempt at blogging was fairly autobiographical in some ways but after a period of time I decided I didn't really want too much of my personal information in the public sphere. I decided to give my blog a more 'professional' focus and take out the more personal stuff.

However I'm of a different generation to the now called 'digital natives' who have grown up with instant messaging, chat and social networks. This generation seems to have a more open view of what details of their private lives they are willing to share publicly, although increasingly they are becoming more savvy as to how to protect their privacy as well. Dana Boyd talks about these spaces being 'mediated public' spaces and explores the complexity for teens in negotiating these new public spaces in a paper 'Social Network Sites; Public, Private or What' While there has been a lot of media hype about the danger of these spaces for young people, Dana Boyd encourages educators to learn about these spaces and give young people practicle knowledge of how to use them.

The possible conflict between private opinion and professional practice are reflected in the BBC recently published guidelines for employees who keep blogs and use social networks. Which offer employees advice such as;

staff members who want to start blogging, and wish to say that they work for the BBC should discuss any potential conflicts of interest with their line manager.

If a blog makes it clear that the author works for the BBC, it should include a simple and visible disclaimer such as “these are my personal views and not those of the BBC”.

The advice to managers in the guidelines say

Managers should bear in mind concerns about impartiality, confidentiality, conflicts of interest or commercial sensitivity. In some cases individuals may be dealing with matters which are so sensitive that rules may have to be set on what they can and cannot talk about on their personal blog.

This seems to indicate that employees can blog about their work and opinions about the BBC as long as they state they are personal views and are within the editorial guidelines. If a person does not identify themselves as an employee or discuss the BBC the guidelines don't apply. Still the lines are fairly blurred.

The BBC has in many ways been a leader in publishing blogs that give an insight into the developments, editorial processes and policy decisions through the Editors blog and Internet blog. In this way the inside workings and people of a large organisation can communicate directly with audiences and allow comments and sometimes a dialogue to take place. Although as Alfred Hermida says in his paper 'The BBC goes blogging: Is Aunty finally listening'. The time and resouces to engage in meaningful dialogue on these blogs is not always available.

What happened to BBC Action Network?

I was interested to note the fate of the BBC civic actvisim site iCan or Action Network which will close on April 30th 2008.

It seems as if it was always going to be fairly experimental coming out of a brainstorming session at the BBC on how to provide an open social space online to promote active citizenship and launching in 2003. Another suggested motivation was to have a better and quicker understanding of grassrooots local issues for journalists. The site allowed people to set up local campaigns, add media, find followers and build networks.

It was one of the first user-generated websites to embrace online democracy and help people publicise their campaigns and articles online.

The blurb on the site said it closed because the social media landscaped has changed signigicantly since the site was set up five years ago and now the popularity of blogs, social networks and e-democracy tools such as e-petitions. Although none of these tools really play the same role in terms of being a hands on tool for local campaigns with access to networks of local politicians etc.

It would be great to see the BBC publish some sort of evaluation of the site, its successes and challenges to inform other public media type initiatives. These types of sites using UGC are usually fairly resource intensive in terms of moderation with the added risk of being accused of bias. It did however provide a unique space for local activity and networking that seemed to fit very well with the BBC charter of "sustaining citizenship and civil society".

Is there a place for public broadcasters to host hyper-local sites such as EveryBlock or set up local social networks for people to interact on.

David Wilcox has some interesting comments and questions in a recent post on the future of BBC's remit for e-democracy and citizen journalism in his blog Designing for a Civil Society

In closing comments on the Action Network the BBC promise

a wider digital democracy broadband project, ultimately aiming to provide video of debates and speeches from our main institutions, information on your local and national representatives, guides to issues and the institutions, and easy ways for anyone to plug in and take part.