[Posted by Jeremiah Owyang]

I was watching the chatter, and participating in the conversation, with great fascination in last Tuesday’s democratic nomination. 

I’ve recorded some data using free social media tools (minutes after Obama left the stage), that look at keywords on twitter, as well as ‘traffic’ to websites of the runners.  I rarely place much weight in any single use of these tools, but there is a clear trend towards Obama getting a great deal of activity, of course this is skewed toward the activity at hand (the Democratic nomination).

When you look at the longer term charts (such as blog activity and site activity towards the bottom) you’ll continue to see a more active amount of instances for Obama than McCain

You should start by reading Josh Bernoff’s report on The Social Technographics® Profile of Voters, which shows some tell tale data on why the following is happening.  Next, if you’re really serious about monitoring buzz, you should read Pete Kim’s reports on brand monitoring.


twist
Above: Twist provides activity of keywords over last 7 days.  I recorded this immediately after Obama spoke.  No surprise that Obama frequency would be higher during this event centered on him.

tweet
Above: TweetVolume, date range unknown, making it difficult to place any weight on the value of this graph

spectrum
Above: Tag clouds comparing the three keywords, interesting, but not telling much, other than idea association, of course, context is everything, so the terms could be used in a negative way.

ice
Above: Blog Activity Over last 30 days, this is telling, Obama keywords much higher frequency.

alexa
Above: Alexa Website activity to Candidate sites, Obama has higher traffic

compete
Above: Compete website activity to Candidate sites, again Obama

Of course, the above tools are all free, and you can apply to your brand, but warning, you always get what you pay for.

Analysts, Readers, Clients, how did you interpret this data?  What recommendations would you make to both the Republican and Democratic web teams?