Just launching today: VoterTide, which employs technology originally designed for the music industry and now being applied to politics. Journalists, bloggers and the rest of us can use the VoterTide’s basic version to follow the presidential candidates’ activity, watching their follower growth, see their trending videos, and measure the “Tide Score” generated by the site based on their activity.
But here’s what’s particularly interesting from our point of view: campaigns can use the site’s Pro version to monitor their own and their opponents’ social media presences in detail. Sign up for an account, and you can track a campaign’s social media activity, their followings (and follower growth), the most recent and most prominent online stories about them, and the phrases most commonly associated with them online. Of course, a campaign could hand-assemble most of this data on its own, but VoterTide aggregates it automatically and displays it via a straightforward interface. When your campaign or your opponent generates buzz, you’ll see it quickly, giving staff and consultants much more time to react.
Check out the screenshots after the break to get a taste of VoterTide. I suspect that this service will turn out to be particularly useful for candidates in crowded primaries and for consultants monitoring many different clients at once.
Screen Shots
Click each image for a full-sized version.
Let me know if you use this tool in an actual campaign! I’m curious to see how it works out in practice.
– cpd
Social media monitoring at any level will be of great benefit to any campaign. However, every tool approaches it in a different way. Free or low cost tools only sample a small set of sources, especially on Twitter. So their numbers are going to be off. We ran a simple search on Elizabeth Warren and were able to pull in almost 30,000 mentions via Social Radar. That is quite a bit more than the 2000 mentions that Voter Tide reported. Not only do the more sophisticated tools bring in a larger data set to analyze they can show the sentiment behind the posts and amount of passion as well. Again, Voter Tide will be of good use to campaigns with a limited budget. However, a campaign should look at other tools as well as agencies that specialize in social media monitoring in politics to make sure they able to get the results that will most benefit their campaign.
Hi Steven,
I just noticed this comment, sorry about the late reply. I’m Jimmy Winter, co-founder and lead developer of VoterTide. In the screenshot above we’re showing nearly 2000 mentions of Elizabeth Warren during just a 24 hour period on November 10th. The screenshot above doesn’t include our data for Facebook, Blogs, News outlets and the several other pieces of our offering.
We’ve spent two years developing the data collection and processing engine and handle over 70,000 points of data every minute so our sample size is pretty significant. (Nearly 1 billion on Twitter alone)
Myself and our team feel our offering is a great tool for both large and small campaigns. I’d love to give you a tour of our app personally! If you have a chance, e-mail me at jimmy@votertide.com and we can set something up.
Thanks
Jimmy
I currently use buzzbundle as it monitors facebook, twitter, google+, linkedin and YouTube – which I believe no other tool monitors all these plus it also covers every blog, forum, website etc
And the better bit which I cant see from these tools is that it runs silently in the background – will notify me of anything anywhere – and with one click I can reply directly. I can also simultaneously reply on my twitter, FB, YouTube, Google+ social profiles – and I can also reply with different profiles / persona’s – something I also dont think is available with other social monitoring tools.
Would like to hear any comments re this
Angela