Social O #2

I've started recording the strength, sentiment, passion, and reach for Obama on Social Mention, as well as the same for Boehner and Palin. After the jump are graphs, the first of which is of stats for Obama and the other four are for each stat individually, tracking all three terms (Obama, Boehner, Palin). It is difficult to draw conclusions from these findings yet, as I have only been tracking the stats for five days. However, there are some trends that I see.

 

 

Observations (please note that the sample size is very small so I am going to wait and see if these trends continue before spending time figuring them out):

1. For Obama, reach and strength seem to have a direct relationship, as they rise and fall in similar patterns, but passion seems to have a relationship inverse to those two. The former relationship makes intuitive sense but the latter does not seem to. The latter seems to indicate that people mention the President but do not engage in substantive conversation about him.


2. Obama, Palin, and Boehner all seem to see similar trends in strength and reach, although Obama always has far superior strength.

3. I don't see strong relationships between Obama and either Boehner or Palin in sentiment or passion.

4. President Obama gave his speech outlining the reasons for and goals of the Libya intervention on the night of 3/28. I don't see any strong trends since then.


However, if you look at this Google Insights chart,

you can see that interest in President Obama has remained steady for some time. This is the forest for the avove-mentioned trees, so it seems that the major question remains how to create sentiment, reach, and passion as far above his competitors' as his strength.

I think that the answer is to communicate with voters rather than issuing statements of explanation or intent. For example, the President (or rather his team) could have responded to Donald Trump with a tweet linking to an online image of Obama's birth certificate. Perhaps the President could have responded sooner to confusion about Libya with an informal YouTube video preceding his March 28 speech that set the stage for that speech. I think that he could reach out on issues that generate buzz and make the interaction less coldly vertical. I hope to have a more specific plan for this with my final project.