NDP Leadership: Nathan Cullen ahead on Twitter, says media monitoring firm (Google searches too)

Posted by Joanna Smith, Ottawa Bureau

It's hard to say whether Twitter is having an impact in the New Democrat leadership race (or determine the size of that impact), but Ottawa-based media monitoring firm MediaMiser has nonetheless been tracking how much attention each of the seven current candidates have been getting on the social networking site.

Who knows what it means, but it's some interesting trivia for geeks like me (and you, because you know that's why you're reading this) to chew on. If you want to see this done on a bigger scale, check out @mentionnachine, where the Washington Post is tracking Twitter traffic for the Republican primaries.

The company collected all tweets referring to the NDP leadership candidates from Feb. 1 to early afternoon on Tuesday (Mar. 13) and found that B.C. MP Nathan Cullen had the highest proportion of mentions in the tweets collected during that time period, followed closely by Deputy Leader Thomas Mulcair.

Here are the statistics:

Nathan Cullen: 23.4 per cent

Thomas Mulcair: 21.4 per cent

Peggy Nash: 18.2 per cent

Brian Topp: 15.1 per cent

Paul Dewar: 13.7 per cent

Niki Ashton: 6.2 per cent

Martin Singh: 2 per cent

MediaMiser also considered what sort of tone or sentiment was associated with the top three candidates on Twitter (ie. Cullen, Mulcair and Nash) of tweets taken in a random sample on Mar. 13. Positive language contributed to a positive score, negative language to a negative and tweets that included simply a news headline and/or a link to a news story were considered neutral.

The results on that front:

Nash: 59 per cent positive; 38 per cent neutral; 3 per cent negative

Cullen: 54 per cent positive; 43 per cent neutral; 3 per cent negative

Mulcair: 37 per cent positive; 50 per cent neutral; 13 per cent negative

Jim Donnelly, director of content at MediaMiser, said the existence of anti-Mulcair Twitter accounts are probably contributing to some of the negative tone, but likely so is the perception that Mulcair is the frontrunner and therefore coming under attack from fellow candidates and their supporters.

“I would say right now it’s looking like Mulcair has had a lot of momentum in the last few weeks, but to me it looks like the other candidates and other supporters are trying a tactic of almost an ‘Anybody but Mulcair’ sort of thing," Donnelly said Wednesday. "So you’re seeing that in some of the negative comments, but I think right now it’s just looking like it’s going to be a bit closer race than people are thinking at the moment.”

MediaMiser also took a look at the Twitter hash tag most commonly associated with the NDP leadership race (#ndpldr) and found that between Feb. 1 and Mar. 13 it was mentioned 32,166 times.

Here is how that hash tag compared to other ones used for other tweets about the NDP leadership:

Hash Tags	Mentions
#ndpldr	32166
#cdnpoli	6611
#ndp	6151
#ndpdb8	994
#tm4pm	572
#lpc	477
#bcpoli	471
#cpc	407
#cullenplan	254
#hw	167

 

And here were the most commonly mentioned words (including hash tags):

Words	Mentions
#ndpldr	32166
#cdnpoli	6611
#ndp	6151
nathancullen	5570
peggynashndp	4920
thomasmulcair	4423
pauldewar	3176
ndp	2874
briantopp	2674
support	2187

 

MediaMiser also looked at the "top influencers" for the #ndpldr hash tag, measured by the "retweet ratio" (number of retweets measured against number of original tweets including the #ndpldr hash tag). Here are the top 15 (with yours truly at the bottom of that list):

1) @ThomasMulcair                29.4

2) @LaurinLiu                           17.7

3) @PeggyNashNDP              16.2

4) @BrianTopp                           12.1

5) @CraigScottNDP                   9.2 

6) @PaulDewar                         6.9

7) @NDP_HQ                            5.4

8) @aaronwherry                       4.9

9) @nathancullen                     4.6

10) @fitzpatrick_m                     3.9

11) @acoyne                              3.9

12) @LibbyDavies                     3.4

13) @RachelNotley                   3.2

14) @matness                           3.1

15) @smithjoanna                    3.1

In other NDP leadership fun-fact news, the Cullen campaign is drawing attention to what Google Insights says about how many searches have been done for the candidates over time.

It appears one can analyze only five search terms at a time, so here is the report comparing searches for Mulcair, Topp, Cullen, Nash and Dewar in Canada from September 2011 to this month (the link sent by the Cullen campaign ran from October to April). You'll notice a big spike for Topp in September, presumably when he launched his campaign, then spikes for Dewar, Mulcair and Nash in October, when they launched theirs. Things remained pretty calm from then until now, when there is a sharp increase in the number of searches for Mulcair and Cullen (hence the Cullen campaign sending this around).

Again, it's hard to say what this means, but it has been shown there is a correlations between Google searches for flu symptoms and actual flu outbreaks, so at the very least it shows that people are have been more curious about Mulcair and Cullen of late.

I took a look at the searches for Ashton and Singh over the same time period. There was a big spike for Ashton in November, which is when she launched her campaign, then a small bump for both around the time of the first official all-candidates debate on Dec. 4 and then increased interest in both candidates this month as voting began and the convention draws near.

It is interesting to note that search volume for Ashton was high in Ontario (see regional interest section). For Singh, search volume was high in B.C. and medium in Ontario. But in Manitoba, where Ashton is from and represents the riding of Churchill, and in Nova Scotia, where Singh is a pharmacist, interest was low. So low, in fact, that Google Insights reports "there was not enough search volume to show graphs". Ouch.

Before the other five candidates feel too confident, they should know that they too are all ranked "low" in search volume for every province except B.C., Ontario and Quebec. (Dewar is "low" in every province but Ontario and Cullen is "low" everywhere but B.C. and Ontario).

Now go have fun entering your own NDP leadership search terms to see what you come up with.