After a long and tiring election, Barack Obama will be our next President of the United States. There is much speculation and theories of why he was victorious, but the message was clear - people are hungry for change, and Barack Obama is the face of change.

I decided to use Social Radar for some post analysis of the election (pun intended!). I wanted to get some stats on some of the important issues and how much they were being talked about with each of the candidates. I used Social Radar’s Topic Analysis feature to give us a percentage of posts that each word appeared in around that candidate. I also included a trend chart of each topic to give you a percentage of posts that contained each topic with the candidate. These results are all between September 1st, 2008 - November 3rd, 2008. Here are the analysis results.

Business
Obama 10%, McCain 9%

Economy
Obama 6%, McCain 12%

Education
Obama 9%, McCain 4%

Environment
Obama 7%, McCain 10%

Foreign Policy
Obama 10%, McCain 7%

Healthcare
Obama 8%, McCain 9%

Religion
Obama 20%, McCain 9%

Science
Obama 2%, McCain 3%

Security
Obama 14%, McCain 11%

Tax
Obama 10%, McCain 10%

Technology
Obama 2%, McCain 2%

War
Obama 10%, McCain 16%

These results are certainly interesting, and some even a little surprising. This may not necessarily show why Obama was chosen, but this certainly helps show how important each topic was for each candidate.

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The highly anticipated launch of the iPhone 3G drove many overzealous Apple fanatics to wait at AT&T and Apple stores around the country many hours before the stores opened its doors. I’m not afraid to admit that I was one of them. I, as well as many others, spent our July 11th morning in lawn chairs trying to make use of our time as we patiently awaited our opportunity to get our hands on the newest model of the most revolutionary communication device ever created. When 8am finally hit, the coordinated employees waved in a group at a time to purchase the phones. I was in the second group, and was very ready to walk out of the store with a fantastic new iPhone 3G to play with. However, my excitement started to go sour.

The activation was taking a seemingly long amount of time, and I was given the the bad news that the activation servers were overloaded and I’d have to try again at home. I arrive home to plug in my iPhone and received the same error message. My prior cell phone had been deactivated, but my new phone could not be activated. I had to face the harsh reality that my telecommunication availability was at the mercy of Apple’s servers. Thankfully, the issue was resolved in a few hours, and I could enjoy the new device.

I’m a pretty forgiving person, but its truly a shame when great things get overshadowed by bad events. I had a feeling that this fiasco would generate a plethora of bad press. But, after doing some Social Radar research, it didn’t seem to be quite as bad as I was expecting.

I built a chart comparing all chatter of the iPhone 3G to chatter about the iPhone and activation related chatter.

Looking at the chart above, roughly 7-8% of the iPhone chatter on launch day was related to the activation problems. I was surprised, as I assumed it would be much higher. Granted, I tried to cover many ways that the activation fiasco may have been mentioned, and not all may have been captured here. But, I’m confident that this chart gives us an accurate gauge and covers a good majority of it.

Let’s narrow down and do some comparisons. Below is a bar chart of the difference in iPhone and activation problem related chatter on 7/11.

From this chart above, we can see that almost 14% of the chatter was related to the issues. This is still relatively low. However, let’s see a bar chart for this same comparison on 7/14 (three days later).

This chart shows that in just 3 days, this chatter has lowered to only around 8% of the chatter, nearly half as much.

We can conclude that it looks like Apple has been forgiven and people have moved past the issues they had on launch day.

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The long awaited iPhone 3G announcement came as no surprise to enthusiasts last Monday at the annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Many websites have been discussing and rumoring the iPhone 3G months prior to the event. But, it didn’t stop the roars and cheers of the crowd as Steve Jobs made the official confirmation. As with any iPhone related news, we expected a surge in online chatter. We were right.

That’s a nice surge. On June 9th, 2008, 1 in every 55 post mentioned the iPhone.

I think it’s safe to say that there was plenty of buzz about it. However, we wanted to dive in a little deeper and find the hot topics of discussion around the 3G iPhone. We ran our popular topics feature in Social Radar. Here is what we found.

1: “gps” (30%)
2: “price” or “cost” (26%)
3: “app” or “applications” (21%)
4: “speed” or “fast” (10%)
5: “mobileme” (7%)
6: “audio” (7%)
7: “battery” (5%)

Above is a list of the most interesting topics we found, showing a percentage of how much each topic appeared in iPhone related chatter. The words are stemmed, so “fast” should also pick up “faster” or “fastest”. This is an interesting outcome, as I would have expected more mentions of its increase in speed and improved battery life. As we can see from this list, the GPS was a very large topic of discussion among this chatter, and it’s easy to see that people feel this was the most substantial upgrade to the phone.

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Microblogging is becoming more and more popular and much of its success can be contributed to Twitter, a service that has proven to be a powerhouse as its growth continues to explode. But, as with any concept that catches on, there are bound to be contenders who attempt to do it better. Who are these competitors and are they up to the challenge to take on the microblogging champion? We decided to do a little research with Social Radar.

Below is a chart to show chatter over the last 90 days of the big Twitter contenders (Plurk, Brightkite, Pownce, and Jaiku).

From the chart above, it shows that Jaiku has a small lead on these other services. Jaiku is a very similar service to Twitter, and with the recent announcement of a Google partnership, it has a strong recipe for success. However, not far behind Jaiku is Pownce. That’s no surprise, as the Digg.com founder, Kevin Rose was a creator of Pownce, which has helped lead to some easy conversions. However, as we dug in a little deeper, we noticed something interesting. Plurk, a service very similar to Twitter which offers some additional features such as an interactive timeline and “karma”, a number that correlates to your post activity and friends, has been generating a lot of buzz over the past week or so.

Due to Twitter’s recent lack of functionality and constant downtime, complaints have been swarming around the community and has caused many to look elsewhere to fulfill their microblogging desires. As of just this last week, there has been substantially more Plurk chatter than any of the 3 other services combined.

Will this trend continue? It’s hard to say. But, this certainly means that Plurk has a real shot at being the prevailing contender over the next few months.

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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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To start off the blog, I’ll throw some stats around a social media darling: The iPhone.  Talk about social brand popularity!  Chatter around the Apple iPhone is nothing short of crazy.  An easy way to show this is a chart from Social Radar below which shows the percentage of total posts over the last year containing iPhone in red versus posts containing either Blackberry, “Windows Mobile” or Nokia in green:

iPhone manages to beat all three of these competing brands put together in social chatter.  Quite impressive to say the least, but for another bit of stats, the day the iPhone came out (June 29, 2007), around 1 in 40 blog posts mentioned it.

The day the iPhone SDK [Software Development Kit] was announced (March 6, 2008), iPhone saw another large spike in chatter and was in around 1 in 100 posts, although in the last 30 days, only around 1 in 35 iPhone posts has mentioned the SDK.  This is still enough, though, to make the SDK one of the hottest topics around the iPhone lately.

Quite the powerful brand Apple has created for their first phone.

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