The 2010 Australian Election is going to be an interesting one for social media analysis, because for the first time we will see to be able to see whether social sentiment is going to have an impact on how people vote. I started looking at this on Friday 16 July, the day before the election was called, and left the social media monitoring tool looking at the same keywords over the weekend which included the day of the election announcement.

This analysis is from 1 to 18 July and includes mainstream media as well as strictly “social” media channels. Twitter has by far the largest volume of mentions for both parties.

To see the impact social media has on volume, look at the day that Julia Gillard started tweeting. It caused a spike almost as large as the day the election was called when you look at all media, but on Twitter itself, had more interest/volume than the election announcement.

Net Sentiment score: Liberal Party in front

On Friday, the share of  voice was dominated by Labor with 78% of conversations about Labor or  Julia Gillard and 22% was for Liberal or Tony  Abbott (for Australian domains only, I didn’t have enough time to run a US and AU inclusive search).

By the end of Sunday, even though the numbers had spiked massively in terms of the volume of conversation, and even with US domains included in the search, the share of voice had moved only 1%, 77% Labor to 23% Liberal. I also ran a sentiment score analysis on Friday and again post election announcement.

Pre-election announcement:
(1 is positive so both have a negative score)

• Labor net sentiment 0.67
• Liberal net sentiment 0.74

Post-election announcement including US domains
(1 is positive so both have a negative score)

• Labor net sentiment 0.67
• Liberal net sentiment 0.70

So Liberal sentiment is going down and Labor’s is steady. It will be interesting to keep watching this score to the election. I haven’t looked at the entire “landscape” of the wider election sentiment in this analysis so the Greens and other parties issues are not included here, just the 2 major parties.

Analysis of Liberal & Labor social media efforts

There’s poor form overall from both Liberal and Labor. They’ve both set up social channels but use them to broadcast messages just like they do in traditional media channels, and they let the emergent community monitor itself. Spam is a problem in Facebook for the Liberal Party (not that they do anything about it).

There are huge missed opportunities to respond to issues in social channels. Neither party is responding in any channel to the huge volume of discussion. They may or may not be monitoring the issues, but given the extremely negative sentiment regarding internet filter, and immigration policy and boat people, the Government could at least be pro-actively addressing these issues.

Here are the breakdowns

Australian Labor Party

Website

Newly relaunched site has 2 places for social engagement

-it’s a public forum – the main barrier to entry is that people must register

-can’t login with Facebook, Twitter OpenID or any other “social identity”

-people can give ideas for policy

-Blog is more an article feed – users can’t comment

-Interactive game – “Tony Abbott Hospital Cuts” game

Twitter

Australian Labor

http://twitter.com/AustralianLabor

1,680Following1,638Followers

Joined 10 December 2009

Ratio:

Good following to followers ratio- they are making an effort to follow back everyone who follows them – best practice

Hashtags:

• ALP Use of hashtags is not as smart as it should be. Inconsistently used, inconsistent naming, and too generic.
• For example, tweets marked with #news and #blogs too generic and does not enable people to search for specific ALP topics relevant to them
• Only started using specific hashtags Friday 16 July related to their 2 community forums #Thinktank and #LaborConnect
• Again #ThinkTank could be anyone’s think tank and does not identify it as ALP. Should be #ALPThinkTank to make it work harder for them
• Use Twitter lists as a way to track MPs but only one list

Content:

Not conversational at all – use it to broadcast blog article links, official announcements.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard

http://twitter.com/juliagillard

9,389Following20,752Followers

Joined 27 October 2009 but only tweeting since July 4, 2010

Ratio:

Decent follower to following ratio, would say that since she’s been PM that it’s difficult to get the auto-follow to keep up with the amount of people following her each day

Content:

Strictly broadcast

Tweet content is partly first person, partly third person. Inconsistent tone suggests her account is managed by different people but there’s no transparency on who’s tweeting on her behalf.

Facebook

Julia Gillard

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Julia-Gillard/161674172327

32,651 People Like

Australian Labor

http://www.facebook.com/LaborConnect

1,620 People Like

Facebook commentary is raging on every article or status posted in Facebook on Julia’s page but no official voice is responding.

The community is talking to itself here, on the wall, discussion board, but there is no input from the people running Julia’s page.

The community is left to run and moderate itself – not best practice

Minimal/no spam so the pages seems to be monitored but no responses back from anyone running the pages.

YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/user/australianlabor

Subscribers 1504

72 Videos

Channel Views: 185,685

Total Upload Views: 765,591

Style: Broadcaster

Joined: June 10, 2007

Australian Liberal Party

Website

• has “support”, “comment” and “like” social interaction features on the “Our Ideas” section of their website
• “Our Ideas” as a name for this section does not suggest that feedback is elicited (i.e. they are Liberal Party ideas and they aren’t interested in your ideas) or wanted and as a consequence doesn’t have a lot of responses

Twitter

Liberal Party

http://twitter.com/LiberalAus/

3,801Following4,261Followers

Good following/followers ratio

Joined 4 April 2009

Content:

• Strictly broadcast but well written tweets
• Links to news content articles on Liberal website

Hashtags:

• Easily identifiable and consistent use of hashtags
• #myliberal and #ausvotes on every tweet.

Tony Abbott

http://twitter.com/TonyAbbottMHR

20Following10,950Followers

Joined

Poor following ratio – doesn’t follow people back

Content:

Broadcast. Not conversational

Personal content with photos and descriptions, mixed in with jabs at the government and then also Liberal policy announcements.

Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/LiberalPartyAustralia

6,751 People Like This

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tony-Abbott/216342268645

7,920 People Like This

Both these pages have Facebook spam (people linking to off topic or personal pages) suggesting its not viewed or monitored very well.

YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/liberalpartytv

74 Videos

Subscribers: 6

Channel Views: 20,985

Total Upload Views: 230,283

Joined: September 28, 2008

Summary

Neither Liberal nor Labor parties are responding in any of the social channels – they are too busy “broadcasting” messages and leaving the communities to manage and moderate themselves. The debates are raging (on and off topic) in Facebook and Twitter, but with no official responding voices in any party channels. The only minor benefit is that the parties are taking the political messages into the social spaces where the voting public spend the majority of their time online.

What do you think? Would the political party that addressed the issues in social spaces get any brownie points going into this election?