Starting out it looks like he's tied for second,
maybe third place following the Iowa caucus.
Looks like he's also again in third place, so not leading the pack early on, so
if we were to look at these volume numbers,
we would think there's huge interest in Ron Paul as a candidate.
Well, if this is from December through the beginning of January,
if we were to look at polling numbers.
I pulled from Real Clear Politics at roughly the same point in time,
looking at where Ron Paul's numbers were.
So Ron Paul is in orange.
Never does he approach the front runner status when we're looking at what
the polls are telling us.
All right, so we see a little bit of a disconnect here,
on the one hand we have a measure of volume based on social media activity.
On the other hand we have more of a traditional research technique,
saying offline polling, and you can think the same way that we think about using
surveys for marketing research to understand perceptions of brands.
That they're not always going to be aligned with each other.
And why is that?
Well, part of that's going to have to do with who are the people participating
in the social media conversations vs the people who are participating
in traditional polls.
When it comes to social media we don't have the same control
over the people who are selected to participate in the conversations.
The decision that somebody makes to participate in that conversation
is probably indicative of their level of interest.
So if you start posting about a politician
whether it's a presidential candidate or a senate candidate, on Facebook on Twitter,
chances are that you're very interested in that race.
Whether you're a supporter or a detractor for them, you're probably very interested.
You have a strong interest in politics compared to the average person.
Whereas, if we look at people who are participating in polls,
not everyone has that same level of interest.
So we're potentially dealing with two different populations and
they may not be representing the same groups.
What we see on social media might be more of
those hardcore individuals with strong preferences.
Whereas what we see with traditional polls,
traditional marketing research studies, is that we go out of our way to make sure
that it's representative of the population of interest.
And that representativeness is going to be one of the big concerns that we're
going to have when we're trying to use social media data for marketing insights.