I had the joy of being in Washington for election night - so got to experience the giant Obama love-in that spontaneously gathered outside the Whitehouse after the California results came through. The Whitehouse celebrations were a kinda mix between a Take That concert - crowds of adoring fans screaming uncontrollably - and a football match - with choruses of chants.
The chants and screams seemed largely dictated by the presence… read more
Yesterday we launched the “vote phase” of the Department of Health’s Care and Support debate - aimed at getting the general public to have their say on the issue by voting on various key issues.
We’re excited about this new phase as it provides a really simple way for people to take part in the online debate, and also provides a way for users to see what other people… read more
For a long time now there’s been a political debate rolling on about Europe, largely around the questions of its relevance to modern Britain and what exactly it does (and of course why are they so bad at golf?!).
Clearly there’s no easy or simple way of addressing these issues. Europe, as a political body, is undoubtedly a complex body - yet, as complex as it is, it also has a… read more
Every year I help run a course on “e-governance” for the Royal Institute of Public Administration. The course runs for 2 weeks over the summer, and my class is an assortment of civil servants from an assortment of countries - this year we had guys from Oman, India, Nigeria, Zambia and Ghana.
As part of the course I take the class on a magical mystery tour of e-governance projects across the… read more
I’ve finally managed to dig out this v.interesting blog post on a recent piece of research from New York University’s Stern Business School that correlates online “chatter” to higher physical album sales.
What the researchers did was to monitor the levels of online buzz - in particular blogs posts and MySpace friends - created by 108 different album releases in the first two months of 2007, and then cross-referenced this… read more
Today we launched our final Opinion Tracker analysis for the Mayoral elections. The results are pretty interesting, with what looks like a final surge of buzz and positive sentiment for Boris.
Check out our latest election opinion research results here
Plus you should also check out a piece I’ve written for the Prospect Magazine blog about the “Tube-stepping” trend we’ve identified through our Opinion Tracking. If… read more
On Friday we published our latest Opinion Tracker analysis of what people are saying around the internet about the Mayoral elections. To read the full report, check out our internet opinion analysis here.
Quick snippets of insight include:
Since its official launch yesterday, Opinion Tracker seems to be creating a real buzz within the political and marketing / research communities, requiring us to turn Opinion Tracker on itself to find out what people are saying about the product around the net…
Mentions so far include something nice and big from Brand Republic, a front page on Research Magazine and some good comments from our… read more
We’ve launched a nice new shiny product called Opinion Tracker. Opinion Tracker does what it says on the tin i.e. it monitors what people are thinking and saying around the net.
We track conversations around the net (in forums, communities, blogs and videos) and then analyse these to show what people are thinking and saying about specific issues - whether that’s to do with an event like the… read more
I’m not sure who made this or what it’s for, however it’s a v.good pastiche of political campaigning in the US.
I particular like the Apathy Party’s campaign slogan of “whatever”, the idea of having a “nonifesto” and it’s poll on climate change which includes “staying inside more” as a way of helping stop climate change - which is kinda true in an obscure way, and no… read more