Political Emotions

The past week in Romania was all about the general turmoil around the debates ignited by the president Basescu around needed healthcare system reform. Following the example of the citizens in Targu Mures, last night several thousands of people in Bucharest, Brasov and Sibiu occupied the streets showing their support for the advancement of the reforms in the public health sector. Their enthusiasm was visible online early on during the week, with Facebook maintaining a major role in the civic effervescence.

Having this in mind, the recent news that Facebook allowed access to its data for text mining and sentiment analysis purposes concerning the GOP primaries cannot be ignored. Au contraire. Social media analysis is undoubtedly playing an important role in political competitions, but until now researchers had to stick to alternative means of reaching and measuring the noise (such as counting Twitter mentions or Google search relevance). Getting access to and, more important, aggregating all those political feelings Facebook users share with their friends can provide a real-time tool for determining the outreach of political events as they happen, even making it possible for the campaign managers to adjust the message being conveyed piecemeal.

While this sentiment analysis opportunity is currently limited to the US, we might expect in the not so distant future to see it made available in more countries and to other organizations. Note also that Facebook users might not be that happy with the social site sharing their private thoughts, but what should they know is that messages are analyzed anonymously by special software designed for that purpose.

Town hall meeting

The Internet offers politicians infinite ways to reconnect with the citizens. Some campaign teams go for more classical solutions such as e-mails, websites and online advertising, while most present-day political messages are delivered via alternative wide-reaching channels such as blogs, podcasts, Youtube, Twitter updates or Facebook pages.

Engaging voters, recruiting volunteers, and raising campaign funds via new media is simply a matter of few clicks.

Microsoft jumps on this political bandwagon with its cloud-based TownHall app, which claims “to combine the grassroots appeal of the town hall meeting with the reach of the Web”. Launched at this year’s Politics Online Conference, TownHall works on Microsoft’s Azure platform (therefore, it comes at a price) and uses a badges system to convince its users to vote and answer questions.

As promising as it might sound, TownHall is not build to become mainstream and will probably end up being used by large political organizations. Nonetheless, it shows us that the 2008 US presidential election changed the way big players in the IT sector relate to politics.