Buzztrend has monitored the French, the Italian end the Spanish election and found in all three instances a strong correlation between online buzz for a certain political contester and the final outcome of the election. We have also been able to pinpoint emerging issues in the campaign, that traditional media has picked up at a later stage.  These results reinforce our belief that social media buzz is indeed a clear reflection of what people care about, and that search technologies, like the one developed by Attentio, has the power to extract online political intelligence for further analysis.

It is true that a large part of the population is not online, at least not as active participants on blogs. Our data shows, however, that the active online population participating in online political discussions is significant.

The US election in 2004 was the first election where political parties used the internet actively in campaigns. As we know, this trend has continued. In France in 2007, Sarkozy and Royal broke new ground. Then, came the US campaign and the race to become the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party.

Both Clinton and Obama are notably present across numerous social media platforms. But Obama, has led an online campaign different from Hillary. He has more cleverly used social media and adapted his messages to the particularities of that media: He has managed to build sustainable online communities around his message of change. Using a village metaphor, he has built a community and a village square. Every day, people gather in the square to listen and to share among themselves thoughts about and their acclaims for a rising town leader. And it has become a forceful social movement. Take youtube for instance, one of the social media platforms buzztrend is monitoring. There, people have made their own and sometimes very forceful campaign contributions, like the Obama girl and the music video made by the Black Eyed Peas. They are not part of the campaign, but people get together, creating a user generated campaign, or better a voter generated campaign.

If the attention for a specific candidate on Youtube is anything to go by, like we have seen in previous elections monitored by buzztrend, Obama will be the winner not only of the democratic race, he will also become the next president of the United States.