When "Web Echo" of Political Candidates Correlate with Opinion Poll Results (France President Election 2007)
For the last few months, I embarked in a new and interesting R&D project.
This project relates to potentially correlating opinion polls results with the web presence of candidates for election for the up coming French 2007 President (Election May 2007). The hypothesis was simply to state that if the web is more and more a reflect of our day to day reality, it should be pretty informative to listen to what web the "says" and more precisely see how the "web echo" of candidates correlates with political opinion polls run by such companies as TNS Sofres, Ipsos, Ifop, CSA, etc. (all leading opinion polls companies in France).
I released these first results early last week in France with some interest (Note en Français)... as my initial hypothesis seems to stand true...in fact, they go over my initial expectations. Judge for yoursefl!
The following slides show "Share of Voice" of candidates change over time (in June and July 06) (first chart) as well as correlations of Share of Voice with Voting Intents (second chart) for the 8 candidates measured by Ifop as of June 30th, 2006...
Correlation is over 0.9! Amazing, no? What do you think? I am not really surprised...but still quite amazing no?
I really mean "web echo" and not "blog echo" per say. So the metric gathered here is really more a "noise" rather anything else metric in communication terms.
I simply gather the web echo counting full candiate names presence (first name + name) in a 2007 election context. In other words, a simple query is enough...
The so called Share of Voice is simply the % of mentions for one candiate vs all others. Simple...still it seems that it works...
Interestingly, it seems that Noise, or Presence is enough for now to correlate with opinion results. I am not taking into account sentiment or mood around each candidate... and indeed as blogpulse trend chart chart shows conversations go on, and I am sure that they will increase singnifcantly over time as we get closer to May 2007...as many French political experts already said part of the President 2007 French Election will be played...online!
As Oscar Wilde said it seems indeed that for now, and from the initail data set available:
"There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about".
I am sure that the coming weeks/months will be insightful!
Are you aware of any similar research that did try to correlate web echo, conversations, buzz to Polls to predict Polls outcome, if so please let me know! Thanks!
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