I was hoping this story describing the use of Twitter to track public sentiment on important public policy issues and predict election results would die a quiet death. It seemed to have done just that until Robert Bain dug it back up in this month's issue of Research. A close reading of the study shows that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and the authors can't seem to make up their minds whether Twitter is reflecting the sentiment in the larger population or driving it. More importantly, they never try to answer the key question: why should this work at all?
The Research article goes on to describe a similar study by Tweetminister that apparently predicted the share of vote in the recent UK election "on a par with Ipsos, Poulus, and Harris." In this case, Bain has the good sense to ask why this should work and the Tweetminister CEO explains, "What happens on Twitter doesn't stay on Twitter. It influences what happens on mainstream media and in other places." Really? So in this case it seems that Twitter is driving public opinion rather than reflecting it.
Within moments of reading all of this I saw a link on Twitter to a fascinating study by the folks at Pew who have looked carefully at the relationship between social media and mainstream media. Two findings are relevant here:
- Politics accounted for just 6 percent of posts to Twitter over the 12 month study period. Twitter posts are mostly about technology (43 percent), often Twitter itself.
- Stories don't jump from social media to the mainstream media but the reverse. Only one story, "climategate" created a stir in the mainstream media after it caught on in social media.
The arguments here are eerily familiar to those of us who were around in the early days of online panels. No theory was ever put forth as to why this approach to doing research would work, only the empirical argument, "It works." And the favored test case: predicting election results.
Some may ask, "Why do we need a theoretical basis for what we do? As long as it works, that's all that matters." The problem, of course, is that without theory you never know when it will work and when it won't. Surely we learned at least that much from online panels.
Comments
One response to “It works!”
Hi Reg. There are a few things I can add to clarify the comments made by Alberto Nardelli, the CEO of Tweetminster, in my article in the July issue of Research.
When I asked Nardelli to explain why he had used Twitter for this experiment, I was really asking why he had chosen to use just Twitter, rather than a range of social media sources. When he replied that ‘what happens on Twitter doesn’t stay on Twitter,’ he wasn’t contradicting the finding of the Pew study that mainstream media fuels social media (in fact he made that same point, which I suspect he may have gleaned from that same study).
Nardelli’s argument, as I understood it, was not simply that Twitter drives public opinion, but that Twitter helps people spread and share things they find all over the web. A story might originate on a mainstream media site, but many people will discover it through links shared by their friends on Twitter. In this way it influences what people see, do and think in relation to other sites. It’s this role of oiling the wheels of the web which, in Nardelli’s view, makes Twitter a more useful subject for social media analysis than other more self-contained networks.
Importantly, he also made very clear that the study was an experiment, based on a general feeling that social media is important and worth trying to make sense of. I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that a theoretical basis isn’t important, they’re just interested in finding out whether something might work before they start worrying too much about why it should.
The short answer to the question of whether social media drives or reflects public opinion, surely, is both – although it looks like we’ll have to wait until the next election to find out how those two factors fit together. What I see here is a rich source of data and some people trying to work out what they might be able to do with it. I suspect that, at this stage, the question they are asking themselves more often than ‘Why should this work?’ is ‘Why shouldn’t this work?’ and ‘I wonder if it does?’
And as a place to start, that’s fair enough, isn’t it?