Mark Blevis

Part 1 of this series sets up the discussion with reflections on the first week and some high-level stats.

At the macro level, online chatter is not as conversational as many predicted it would be. That may be in part due to the sheer volume of traffic. Staying on top of the discussion stream has become extraordinarily difficult.

This volume of traffic serves as a phenomenal focus group for analysts and campaigns. However, it doesn’t serve the needs of average Canadians hoping to learn more about their candidates and campaign platforms. For that, Canadians would be best served focusing their online attention on candidate websites, blogs, audio podcasts, YouTube (or other) video channels, Flickr photo galleries, Twitter streams and Facebook Fan Pages (This of course assumes the candidates have adopted any of these communications tools and made them easy to locate).

I refer to this as the need to move from mass-globalization (or mass-nationalization) of the conversation to hyper-localization of engagement.

Where Twitter has excelled as a communication tool in the last week is in the role of amplifier. Only a small portion of tweets serve as “fresh content” (39%). Even fewer represent conversation in the form of replies or “@replies” (14%). The most active category of traffic is re-tweets or RTs (47%), the so-called amplification when Twitter users re-broadcast existing messages to their own network of followers – sometimes with comments pre-pended to the original message.

Twitter use was strong out of the gate. Traffic swelled during the week on three prominent issues:

• The exclusion of Elizabeth May from the official debate (traffic for which was denoted using the keyword hashtag #emayin);
• The sparring between Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff over a possible one-on-one debate; and,
• The online “assault” of Senator MacDonald following his Tweet accusing two reporters for being “attack dogs”.

While activity trailed off on Friday to a level below the beginning of the campaign, Canadians still issued more than 11,000 tweets.

The BuzzGraph shows the connected elements of conversation during the first week. It’s expected that parties and their leaders will figure prominently in the conversation so their presence is not surprising. The BuzzGraph reveals more from an issues perspective.

Chatter about the coalition has held strong throughout the week. A few story lines (#emayin and the one-on-one challenge) have kept debate in the graph as well. Newcomers to the graph include 41.3, 30.3 and majority following the Ipsos-Reid poll results suggesting Canadians are more comfortable with a Layton-led coalition than a Conservative majority. That report is likely to keep coalition on the BuzzGraph for a while.

It’s interesting to note that Twitter is also part of the discussion. As a nascent election campaign tool, Twitter has become a story of its own. This may not be the Twitter election, however it could be the push Twitter needs for increased Canadian awareness and participation.

The Word Cloud helps us understand the frequency of word use in the Twitter conversation. Among the most common words are cdnpoli, elxn41 and fed2011, both keywords called hashtags (usually preceded by a number sign as in #elxn41) used to identify the tweet has content relating to Canadian politics or the 41^st general federal election. Another popular term specific to Twitter is rt, short form for retweet, used to identify the re-broadcast of a message shared by another Twitter user.

Issues making an appearance in the Word Cloud include majority, debate (and debates) and coalition. You might even notice rickmercer making an appearance at the top of the cloud following his interest in hosting a debate with a charity carrot attached to the invitation.

Also in the Cloud are t.co and bit.ly, both services which allow Twitter users to shorten URLs to conserve space within the 140 character message limit, making it possible to include more content.

Next up in the week in review analysis… blogs.

Charts, graphs and analysis made possible by Sysomos MAP.