I’ve been working on a couple a large projects over the past several months, and I have been hopeful that one of them would come to a close so that I could blog about at least one of them. Well, we finally made it to the finish line with one of them, Social Media vs. Polling. I worked with Bryan Merica from Activate Direct (www.activatedirect.com) and Ben Tulchin from Tulchin Research (www.tulchinresearch.com) to review both the Polling data and the Social Media conversations from the 2010 California Governor’s race between Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman. There were some interesting elements to this race, in part, the dichotomy between the two candidates. Jerry Brown was governor of California back in the last 70s and early 80s and a democrat. Meg Whitman was formerly the CEO of ebay and largely funded her own campaign up to the tune of $160M+, more than any other candidate in history, a Republican.

We reviewed the overall election story line and how polling data and socials media data tracked against each other. We looked further at some of the key events that took place during the race to review how social media could have been used to better understand voter opinion. There are some very interesting results. I won’t make this a long blog entry since the whitepaper is already written.  Read on…..

Here is the link: Social Media vs. Polling in the 2010 California Governor\'s race (182)