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Interestingly, yesterday's data points to a different winner other than Vince Cable

Any serious company director or manager, had they been confronted by this trio as candidates for a middle-ranking Finance Director post, wouldn't have hired any of them.

@ 1. Well only if you count how many times someones name was mentioned. Im sure they weren't all positive mentions!

One of the big problems with viewing Twitter as a way to analyse the results is that it's about the size of the Twitter 'team' voting for each contender. Most of the people that will decide the election weren't on Twitter and possibly weren't even watching.

I did both - and thought that Osborne won -

It's an interesting (if not yet scientific) field — for example I've been monitoring social web content produced in Birmingham for almost two years now and producing an "emotional wellbeing" rating (as it's based on any sentiment rather than around a subject). It does rise and dip around weather and sporting events as you'd predict — have a quick look on twitter (@birminghamuk).

"Twitter, rather than television, could be the place where the issues are really dissected."

It could be, but it won't be.

Twitter's brevity is its strength and its weakness. Issues won't be dissected, but style and impact will be, mercilessly. How many comments were there on their ties vs their economic policies?

There will be a lot of chatter on Twitter and that is great - but it will primarily reflect the opinions of those tweeting rather than impartial dissection, as has always been the case.

Unfortunately, television debates are all about style and how you come across, and very little to do with substance. Remember the West Wing episodes about debate prep?

Technicalfault: "How many comments were there on their ties vs their economic policies?"

I see you went to the trouble of making an analysis. Thank you for your effort.

"At 11:06am on 30 Mar 2010, Caledonian Comment wrote:
Any serious company director or manager, had they been confronted by this trio as candidates for a middle-ranking Finance Director post, wouldn't have hired any of them. Caledonian Comment"

Vince Cable was chief financial officer at Shell in the mid nineties..

@1. I don't quite see how being mentioned the most is a good thing, as most of the tweets I've seen mentioning "George Osbourne" OR "George Osborn" have been massively critical of him.

Watchable but pointless, given that none of the three will ever get to be Chancellor.

Real debate should be between Balls sitting on Brown's knee and Clarke.

Sorry to blow a big hole in your digital election thing Rory, but Twitter users are not a cross section of the population. Those who tweet on debates such as last night's are invariably politically active and generally have strong party allegiances already. A great many of the tweets made during last night's event would have been from party activists. As such, the tweet levels are related more to the organisation and tech awareness of each party machine than anything else. The tweeters certainly aren't the floating voters in marginals who could actually make a difference to the election result.

The tweeters don't influence other twitter users. The only people they seem to influence are journalists. What journalists then report about twitter activity is more influential than the tweets themselves. But as I said, the tweets bear little relationship to general public sentiment. An opinion poll, despite its flaws, is always going to be far more representative than an unscientific analysis of an unrepresentative sample.

Despite all the technology tools available, this election will still be won and lost on the TV and the print media.

Rory - I followed the debate over the internet and tested what happened after voting in the Channel4 poll.

Do you know if the IT bods at Channel4 are just using cookies to control/prevent repeat voting?

If so then I'd suggest their internet online poll has zero credibility because of the risk of multiple votes by those who know a smidge about how their PC works.

I'm happy for this post to be zapped after you have read it - don't want any libel actions do we! :-)

Having heard three unconvincing prospective chancellors, I declare that the victor of the debate is ... the IMF!

After all, given the unconvincing arguments we heard, I expect the IMF will be running the economy shortly after the election.

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I think using sentiment and measuring social media buzz around a particular topic is a great way to take a proverbial pulse of how the public is feeling (for example, at Biz360 we are measuring social media conversations around American Idol vote-offs .

However... to echo the sentiment of some of the commenters on this thread: not everyone is on Twitter, and although a lot of people are on it (especially in the U.S.), it skews a lot more tech-savvy and higher educated the the general population. When using social media as a proxy for how the entire country feels, do keep this in mind.

Cheers!

Maria (@themaria on Twitter)

For me it feels like we are on a verge of a new revolution. Just as the moving picture was added to audio broadcast we are seeing the emergence of a new channel of communication to augment television broadcast. You can see in the research the ´óÏó´«Ã½ is doing on subtitles over Internet /blogs/researchanddevelopment/2010/02/subtitles-internet-advanced-tv.shtml that it is only a minor leap to integrate services like twitter. And the fact that Google are exploring a similar avenue with their TV box can only but add weight to this development.

An earlier comment by Technicalfault mentioned that "twitter's brevity is its strength and its weakness. Issues won't be dissected", this doesn't have to be the case as the back channel discussion and the broadcast can easily be re-aggregated allowing people to review and analyse the two streams in context (as demonstrated here

Undoubtedly one of the best places to watch for the view of the crowd is Betfair, where people bet against each other to set the odds. Thus, you get real crowd opinion and not just some view expressed by a bookie.

The markets there react almost instantly to any event and in the wake of the Channel 4 debate last week it was George Osborne and the Conservatives who punters were backing on the site, and you could see that all live in real time.

They have also launched a site in partnership with ComRes, a polling company, that shows live betting and the comparison with polls. It is at www.electionpredict.com and well worth a watch.

Twitter is good for this kind of thing but to get genuine sentiment of what people think (versus what people want) it's always better to look at the thousands of people who are parting with their hard-earned cash on Betfair. 15,000 people bet on the US election on Betfair and it'll be a lot more this year for the General Election here.

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