Buzztrend offers a number of services to our clients interested in understanding and benefiting from the growing importance of social media in the realm of politics and political issues:

The Dashboard

With the dashboard our customers will enjoy automated daily reporting of buzz and demographics in relation to the development of political issues. This online service uses charts to visualize buzz and buzz trends, share of buzz, detection of events, breakdown by source topic and country. With this entry level service, clients receive a unique account where they can track up to 12 user defined topics. One topic could be the name of a candidate for an election or an issue promoted in a political campaign. It could also be the name of a certain commissioner linked to a number of policy areas in his portfolio. Our tracking of the French presidential election in 2007 illustrates well the kind of charts our clients will have access to using the dashboard. 

Buzz reports

Clients that require a deeper understanding of how the different issues are perceived and communicated by the online population, can benefit from our Buzzreport product as a complementary addition to the Brand dashboard. Any number of topics or issues can be configured for tracking through an initial setup process. Results are carefully monitored, analyzed and assembled into one-time monthly reports research reports. Clients with their own specific needs for data mining get access to statistics data for further processing with Microsoft PivotTable/PivotChart or other OLAP/analytics tools. The pricing model is per report delivered.

Election reports

Buzztrend tracks, follows and compiles specific reports on national and regional elections covering the different candidates and the different political issues and how they are perceived by the online population. These reports can be useful for anyone following elections, such as the media and the political parties and the candidates who needs to know more how the online population perceives political messages in the run up to an election.

For a number of elections Buzztrend will publish results and comments on dedicated sites like we hade done for the French presidential election in 2007, the belgium election, the local elections in Norway last year and the Spanish election in 2008

Buzztrend is a service aimed at policy makers, political parties and the media. Monitoring and analyzing social media such as blogs and discussion forums buzztrend delivers valuable information about how policy issues are perceived in the blogosphere. Using state of the web search technologies we can assist policy makers by monitoring what the online community is writing about the number of policy initiatives that are proposed.  Knowing what is being said with reference to the source and geographical region enables policy makers to react and rethink initiatives. We can help in determining the impact of the communication strategy of any political institution that care about the opinions of the online community. For policy makers and politicians buzztrend services will become a necessary supplement to already existing news and press clipping services.  

Since 2007 we have successfully monitored a number of elections and found that our predictions about the outcome have been very accurate against the final result. Not only have we been able to prove the correlation between online buzz and political events in the real world, we have also been able to detect trends before the traditional opinion polls and the offline media. 

Buzztrend supports policy makers, organizations and political institutions with indebt analysis of the policy relevant conversations in social media. Using the latest in state of the art data mining technologies developed by Attentio.com we monitor conversations on political issues relevant to our clients on social media platforms such as blogs and discussion forums.

Social media is a growing source of information on policy related issues. There are numerous examples of bloggers influencing the agenda of policy makers. Individual bloggers have fronted effective online campaigns and pushed issues to the top of the agenda for decision makers in many countries. But the power of social media does not only lie with the individual expert blogger, those who have taken the role as investigative journalists. There are real lessons to be learned from the knowledge aggregated from the whole of the blogging community on those issues the community as such cares about.

Monitoring these trends can in many ways be compared to the traditional polling institute, where questions are made and people asked to uncover where they stand on certain political issues and day to day topics of value to policy makers. Unlike traditional polls, we are not able to ask specific questions, but by carefully defining our search along a number of dimensions using data mining technology, we get can get a fairly good picture of the different trends and how they are affected by specific events.

The French election we monitored in 2007 is a good illustration. For a period of time leading up the election we monitored the different candidates and the relevant issues in the campaign. The search terms we used were the names of the candidates and to each candidate we linked issues such as immigration, the economy, globalization e.g. As we moved towards election day, we were then able to see how the buzz related to a candidate shifted and what emphasis was put on the issues from the conversations in social media. Since the technology is opinion neutral, we were not able to directly translate the number of hits into votes, but measured against the daily opinion polls and the final result, what we measured was as accurate as can be to the outcome. We were also able to spot trends and shifts related to the candidates ahead of the traditional media. Not least, we could monitor the shifts on a daily basis against the largest blog data base in the world. So, when Royal and Sarkozy had met in the last televised debate before the election, we could see a clear increase in articles related to Royal the following day. Then, analyzing the reference material we concluded that a majority of the conversations contained a negative view on her performance.

 We have since monitored both the Belgium election and the local election in Norway in the fall of 2007 and in both cases we again found a strong correlation between the online buzz for certain candidates and political parties and the final result of the election.

The good thing about monitoring elections is that we are able to benchmark our findings against polls and the outcome of that election. But having monitored a number of other political issues like the EU constitution, the buzz on the different EU Commissioners and local politics in Holland, we are confident that the insight we are able to deliver is useful to policy makers and politicians who are looking for facts on what people are concerned about on which to base policy decisions.

 Buzztrend is initiated by individuals who, having worked on EU policy issues and in internet related industries, believe that the vast amount of information on the internet can be better harvested and strategically used by policy makers and politicians. We also believe in the use of technology to enhance the relationship between decisions makers and those individuals and groups affected by their decisions beyond the boundaries of traditional lobbying organizations representing only special interest groups.
  

To read more about the different services we provide