Infegy Blog

Remember Ron Paul? It was no more than just a few short months ago when Ron Paul was all the rage. Internet forums, blogs, and social networking sites were flooded with Ron Paul rants and raves from believers in his candidacy. What happened to all this chatter? What are these people talking about now? As for a lot of them, the answer is Barack Obama.

Barack Obama and Ron Paul may not have a lot of the same views, but they do share one common principal that our young generation is craving - change. So, when did this shift begin? When did Barack Obama begin to take social media and the internet by storm? We were curious, so we dove into Social Radar and did some quick investigation.

First, we’re going to show you where the shift began. Notice that Ron Paul and Obama are fairly close in the amount of chatter, right up to the beginning of January. But more importantly, we can see that chatter begins to surge in early January. This can be tied to the event of the Iowa Caucus, which occurred on January 3rd, 2008.

Let’s now take a look at a comparitive bar chart for the month of December, 2007.

Obama has about twice the amount of chatter as Ron Paul, which isn’t surprising due to the amount of play he’s received from news sites and mass media. Now, let’s take a look at this same comparison chart for February, 2008, not more than 1 month from the Iowa Caucus, what we’ve determined to be the start of Obama’s e-popularity.

His chatter increased over 300% in only 2 months, while Ron Paul’s chatter decreased almost 50% in that same period of time. Barack Obama is now mentioned, on average, in 1 out of every 100 blog posts.

We’ve concluded that the Iowa Caucus was a wakeup call for the internet. The Ron Paul dream began to fade, and Barack Obama became more a reality and a real possibility. Those who crave change now have new faith and a realistic dream.

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