Has Edelman Canada’s “ELECT” shown that Twitter is indeed predicting the Ontario Provincial Election?

Ontario’s provincial election is creating a rivalry between software-as-a-service providers of Twitter analytics on election hot topics and trends, just as major newspapers have historically framed election campaign numbers and stories in favour of who they’d rather see win.

While I featured Nexalogy and the Toronto Board of Trade last week which uses virtual maps to show the top trending words and influencers associated with the conversations on distinct hashtags like #onpoli #ondp #pcpo and #olp, Edelman in a partnership with Meltwater improve on the latter’s efforts to show the full volume of electoral dialogue and sentiments on Twitter with a proprietary Election Listening Engagement Communications Tracker (ELECT). The Progressive Conservatives appear to be the focus of conversations on Twitter, but from looking at a week’s worth of research produced by the platform, one sees how quickly the Liberals catch up in “share of voice”, despite little to no increase in conversations. 

It was front page news in the Toronto Star yesterday when John Teradus reported: “A new hedge fund is harnessing the world’s 140 million daily Twitter messages- covering any and every subject- and feeding them through proprietary computer software that randomly grabs 10 percent of tweets to take a measure of the public’s mood”.  Teradus continued in saying: “A paper published in the Journal of Computational Science concludes the “calm” state can anticipate the rise or fall of the Dow Jones Industrial Average by three or four days, with 87.6% percent accuracy”.

As a result, perhaps it should come as no surprise given the Liberal’s “share of voice” numbers having increased to nearly equal that of the Tories that now a new blended and weighted combination of Ipsos and Nanos polls shows the Liberals will now win a minority government from speculation that perhaps the Tories could win a majority two weeks ago.

That goes in hand with news reported online that becomes popular through social sharing and eventually makes it to the local or national news on television or radio. I’ve certainly noticed that in recent months.

As politics and technology get mixed up once again as we’ve seen in every election since Barack Obama’s historic presidential run back in 2008, social media is perhaps proving worthwhile in terms of predicting premature pollsters right or wrong- for numbers are often slanted by right or left leaning editors of major newspapers when it comes to politics.