What can social media show about politics?

It can show that the professional press does not reflect public opinion.

Attentio is measuring and monitoring the buzz around the European Union and its pet policies and problems. Analysis of the project demonstrates the distance the EU has gone to earn popular legitimacy–as well as the distance the EU has yet to go.

Mainstream news is an accurate source of what the EU is up to. The EU elite carefully publicise their efforts through the professional mainstream media. Last week, EU elites at the Commission and the Parliament met to address the issue of illegal immigration and the need for more border security for the Union. As a result of these efforts of the European elite, the mainstream buzz is all about security and border restrictions. (Note the top red trendline highlighting this prominent issue in the chart below.)

Buzz words picked up by the Attentio algorithms (that’s tech speak for the magic that is the Attentio software) include “detain” and “deportation”. Maybe the EU thinks that if it draws a darker circle around all the Member States, the Union will feel a bit more unified, or maybe the elites are genuinely worried about the estimated 8 million illegal immigrants living inside the special European border-free area, the Schengen.

Either way, the political elite are not effectively engaging the public in their concerns. The buzz in the social media, the blogs and the forums created by the unpaid, unprofessional European citizens, is not concerned with non-European immigration to the EU. For the “average European”, the top concern associated with the EU is democracy.

Europeans in the social media are concerned not with the external EU immigrants so much as internal EU integration. Neither the EU nor the mainstream media is reflecting an accurate version of the “average EU citizen’s” opinions. Europe’s population is concerned that the EU institutions are losing touch with the people that they are supposed to represent. This is the difference between mainstream and social media, and this is the distance that the EU elite have to address.

If they are aware of it. Don’t we wish all politicians would pay as much attention to the media that the people produce as the publications produced by the pros?

Addendum from Attentio’s political analyst:

Further Attentio analyst analysis of the data comes up with this short summary: Europe is pretty regional, and the wider the EU grows, the more these regions mix and bump up against each other. The issue for the EU population is not so much European border controls as the lack of internal border patrols. Immigration, for the EU citizen, is a local problem, and it’s the Europeans from other Member States as much as the immigrants from outside the EU that frustrate localised populations. Prior to addressing the regional frustration that is immigration, it might be better for the EU to integrate vertically, then horizontally.

Here’s a great story about the transport company DHL in relation to a Swedish artist (Erik Nordenenkar) claiming to have done the world’s largest drawing by putting a GPS tracker in a suitcase that DHL had to transport all over the world. In the end, the story about the DHL trip turned out to be fake. A giant YouTube viral stunt by the artist, but not necessary good publicity for DHL.

A blogger (Dan Calladine) has illustrated the story using Attentio’s Trendpedia blog search engine to show that DHL’s buzz is going “viral” all over the world right now. The blog posting is a nice example of how social media monitoring can be used by consumers as well as businesses to track buzz around certain events. Read Dan’s blog posting to get the rest of the story. This blog post illustrates the artist’s DHL viral stunt using Trendpedia. It includes the artist’s original YouTube video. Here is DHL’s buzz around the story as reported on Trendpedia. See the full drawing on Wired.

We spend a lot of time telling people about the power of blogs and the networking that is possible. It is something we really believe in and through blogging we have made great contacts and find it a super place to find and share information.

Just recently, this was brought home to me. When reading Tom Raftery’s two months ago I saw that Shel Israel (co-author of Naked Conversations) and Rick Segal (Canadian investor/blogger) were coming to Europe. I saw that Ireland and other European cities were on their schedule but not Belgium. I thought I should ask why they were not coming here to Brussels, given an emerging interest here in start ups, collaborative software and of course our central position in European affairs :)

Shel responded and asked “Why Brussels?”. A fair enough question, so I gave him the selling pitch (I think I included great beer and chocolate). He said he would talk about it to Rick and come back to me. It turns out that Kris Hoet from Microsoft had also been in contact with them for the same reason and in the end they are coming over on the 21st of October and we will get together a group of bloggers, entrepreneurs and eMarketers for a round table and dinner. (Hopefully we can experience some Brussels night life as well…)

In conclusion, the blogosphere is a great way to make contacts and most of all it’s fun. Their agenda is below

Oct. 14. London– dinner with small group of entrepreneurs.
Oct. 15-16–Scotland. Learning about social media in public education system
Oct. 17–Cork. Meetings with entrepreneurs/blogger dinner
Oct. 18–19 Dublin. Blogger dinner; participate in SaaS conference Trinity College
Oct. 20–Brighton, England, meet entrepreneurs
Oct. 21,2–Brussels, meet with entrepreneurs
Oct. 22-24–Estonia, meet leaders of online community, private dinner.
Oct. 25–Berlin, meeting with entrepreneurs as well as companies in Jenna.
Oct. 25-30. Rome, Guest of American Embassy. speaking meeting with Italian entrepreneurs. 

We have been busy recently but I have had some time to have a couple of conversations with the glitterati of Belgian podcasting. Philippe Borremans who co-founded the IAOC was first and we discussed the emergence of social media tracking and what type of companies could benefit from the solutions. The podcast will be at www.conversationblog.com. I also spoke yesterday with Gerry Murray who is president of the IABC Belgium and we had the podcast at the bustling Conrad hotel in Brussels, more on that later.

Tomorrow I present at Barcamp Brussels. Instigator was Peter Forret and through word-of-mouth alone he has generated quite a group of attendees and presenters… More details are available at http://blog.forret.com/. The twist of this event is everyone has to contribute somehow, do a presentation, demo etc so everyone is more involved, looking forward to it!

I had a podcast today with Tom Raftery, we mainly discussed the evolving requirement for tracking user generated media (blogs, UseNet) and how much this was on the radar of European companies. Definitely worth a listen :) He has a lot of knowledge around podcasting, blogging and web 2.0, so if anyone wants to get up to speed on those areas just listening to his last 5-10 podcasts will certainly help…

I was asked recently by a market research journalist, why blog tracking is relevant for business. Blogs are now on most companies’ radars, but often the discussion is on how they can use blogs as a dissemination tool, not on how they can be used to gain customer insights. There is no question that the numbers are increasing (30 million and doubling every year) For Attentio, this is our business and blogs are only one example of people generated content (UseNet and consumer review sites are very important too), but here is why we think blogs are specifically interesting.

1. Search engine relevance: If you search about an issue, a product, or company it is likely a blog will figure highly in the results i.e. in page 1 or 2. This means the content of a blog will have a large audience of search users. My mother reads about a Gucci handbag in a blog, a patient reads about a new drug in a blog, a person looking to buy a new computer reads about Dell customer service issue in Jeff Jarvis’s blog etc.

2. Connectedness: Bloggers link to other bloggers. Tools like track-back add to this connectedness and often it is possible to follow where an issue was first discussed and how it spread through this network.

3. Content and set up: Blogs are easy to set up and have no editor. There is nothing to stop anyone creating a blog and writing about widely discussed issue or niche topics that interest them. In a sense they can take advantage of the “Long tail” with micro-communities of interested people or post about more mainstream topics.

4. Predictability: If an increasing number of bloggers are talking about a specific product and the sentiment is positive, this can translate into more sales or at least more enquiries. This is product and influence dependent, but there are plenty of case examples. The corollary of negative sentiment also applies.

Attentio can help give perspective on what the buzz around blogs means; to do this we use technology, methodology and standard reporting. A good way to start seeing if this is relevant for your company is by checking Technorati or Google blog search and see how frequently people post on a specific area of interest. Then check out Google Groups and do the same for discussion forums. If the numbers are large, then it might be worth paying professionals to do the analytics work…

For more information on this topic there is a great article from Business Week on the impact of blogs, also a post on this blog from November has a good number of sites to go to.

I’m Simon McDermott, a co-founder of Attentio and previously did my blogging from simonmcdermott.com. I have put a few of these previous posts in the Attentio blog because the subject material is around the area of blog tracking, web 2.0 and the change in relationship between company and customer. I want to write in future about what makes this burgeoning industry special, why organisations and individuals can benefit from this space and of course other interesting trivia (I of course determine what is interesting…). Other members of the team and advisors will also give their views and opinions on Attentio’s space and we look forward to a great discussion. 

This: Yahoo! User Interface Library has to be the beginning of the future of UIs on the web. Back in the old days when I used to program with the MFC, the two things I loved about Microsoft’s ubiquity were that I had a choice of ready-to-use controls/widgets/components at my fingertips that I could easily stick into my application to give it complex behaviour and the fact that if I chose to thus stick, everyone knew how to use it. Java came along (ignoring the disastrous AWT) and sort of made it work (again). Mostly the behaviour was what you expected, but then sometimes. Ah, sometimes. The early days of the web were OK - it was just tables after all. But then the fatal promise of Javascript and DHTML loomed. Suddenly it was roll-your-own time again. And it still is. Years and years later.

I can’t begin to describe how tired I am as a user of struggling with yet another calendar widget on yet another budget travel site. Is it going to pop up with a month view? Will it show me the current date? Will it insert the date if I click it? Or is it just advisory, showing me which days of the week my 1 euro flight is really available on (none).

It’s not that I blame the poor UI developers. The first time you get lumbered with working on a webapp with complex client-side behaviour, you discover that nobody is out there to help you. Or rather everyone is… You want to add a tree control? MFC/Java/.NET apps?, TCL/TK? - no problem. Webapp - take a look at Webmonkey, they have something interesting. It sort of works. Then there’s a bunch of developers with really neat open source controls - how about them? Or how about ASP.NET, Struts, Tapestry…? Hang on, I just wanted a tree I could click and now I have to use a whole framework? (Yes I realize that MFC required a whole OS, but somehow that didn’t feel as bad as a framework. The OS was just kind of there hanging around doing nothing after all.) I’m back in UI pre-history, so what will I do? Take something that sort of works and adapt it so it does. YAWPUS. Yet another widget for the poor users to struggle with.

What I would dearly love to see is industry heavyweights getting together, feeling the love, knocking out some standard components that are so great that UI developers will flock to use them, thus taking the weight off my brain when all I want to do is buy cheap tickets. So as Nat on O’Reilly Radar said “Kudos to Yahoo!”.