Iran Elections Social Media Analytics from SM2 Techrigy

Posted by Marshall Sponder on June 15, 2009 | Link It

After writing my earlier post today on Iran Mainstream Media Coverage and the Fifth Estate – thought that SM2 Techrigy platform might provide interesting view of the social media coverage that isn’t generally seen – I know I’m only scratching the surface here, and I only set up SM2 to cover the last week – but I wanted to see what kind of data it picked out of all the tweets, blog posts, message boards and also focus by country.

First, it’s been a busy week, don’t you think? A lot of commentary happened as the election took place and soon after..

Over the last week, using the advanced searches on Iran and the Election, there was a variety of content created about the Iranian Election.

Of the results SM2Techrigy can track, close to 80% of the Social Media commentary is from 35-49 year old men.

A Cloud Tag what the keywords ought to be for someone who’d want to write about the Iranian Election. In a way, the Tag Cloud makes many of SM2 Techrigy’s charts, superfluous, since most of the information you’ll get, is actually in this tag cloud – but not in as pretty form.

While the information on the Iranian Election is categorized in one way, above, the authors who created the content tell a different story of what the social media is about (shown below):

“moderates” 18895 2008 us election – obama and mccain 2009 21411 360° radar 360º follow 50 a fistful of euros abbreviated pundit round-up abc advertising ahamdinejad ahmadinejad ahmadinejad grabs early lead in iran election ahmoud ahmadinejad alec ali ali akbar hashemi rafsanjani amanda knox analysis ancavge anglais articles as iran votes asset protection attack author – didionsmommy ballot barack obama blog blogs challenger coffee house comment commentary comments contentions cyber-activism editorials election elections facebook farsi feature foreign affairs foreign policy google governance hillary clinton inauguration videos india news infowars international iran iran election iran election 2009 iran elections iranian iranian election iranian election 2009 iranian elections khamenei leaders líbano mahmoud mahmoud ahmadinejad media middle east middle east & north africa mideast peace mir hussein mir-hossein moussavi most viewed mousavi moussavi nbc news nuclear nuclear weapons opinion pakistan politics politics and policies president presidential election religion roundups swj blog feed tehran times top stories turnout us foreign policy victory video war weblog world world news

You would think, based on the author’s tagging of their own content, “the world” is pointing a finger at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – it probably is.

Also all the Social Media commentary came from the US and Europe, and I think Iran isn’t even shown in the map!

And I’m not sure why there are more “positive” references than “negative” references to the Iranian election

Or why the “Tone” of the content is “neutral”

While i was impressed by SM2 Techrigy’s coverage on another project, more positive commentary than negative is not what I expected to find, certainly not over the last week. I need to investigate, but not tonight.

I would expect that Anger would be one of the strongest emotions connected with Iran right now and sure enough, Anger is right up there (see the far left in the chart below).

I can’t do more tonight but I wanted to touch on the idea that we need to start looking at how people react to events and SM2 is a good tool and it’s available as Freemimum software, too.