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The coalition faces an electoral test next week with the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election and the political dials have been turned to max. The seat became vacant when the Liberal Democtrats challenged the win by Labour’s Phil Wooolas, who stood down after a judgement he lied during the campaign. Ten candidates are standing including: Labour’s Debbie Abrahams, the Liberal Democrat’s Elwyn Watkins and the Conservative’s Kashif Ali.
Last May, Watkins lost by 103 votes and Deputy PM Nick Clegg has this week been on the campaign trail in the up-for-grabs constituency. It’s a good time to gauge the sentiment of social media users towards the three main political party leaders and their local candidates. Looking at the national picture for first week of January, Clegg has captured the social conversation.
Figure 1: Buzz volumes for political leaders – 1/1 – 7/1
In terms of sentiment, Clegg had the highest proportion of negative mentions with 9% compared with PM David Cameron at 6% and Labour leader Ed Miliband at 8.7%. But, on the flipside, Clegg also marginally had the highest number of positive mentions at 22.8%, Cameron with 22.5% and Miliband at 19.9%.
Figure 2: Sentiment expressed towards political leaders – 1/1 – 7/1
Sample negative mentions for the three leaders included:
‘Nick Clegg Badgered By Student Protester As He Visits Oldham Ahead Of By-Election’ (Tweet by Iain_31 5/1)
‘The phone-hacking scandal gets a step closer to David Cameron’s press aide with editor sacking …’ (Tweet by Doug Saunders 5/1)
‘Oh. And Ed Milliband is talking utter rubbish in The Times again today. #LabourFail’ (Tweet by Spiderplant Blog 6/1)
And, positive mentions included:
‘The politics are simple enough. Nick Clegg and his Lib Dem cabinet comrades have been blamed disproportionately …’ (Blog post on The Guardian 2/1)
‘David Cameron to invest in ‘industries of the future’ …’ (Tweet by TelePolitics 5/1)
‘…Labour will establish a big lead in the polls and Ed Milliband will be seen to be doing a good job by the end of the year’. (Blog post on Capitalists@Work 2/1)
But, what does the local picture look like for the main parties’ three candidates in the by-election?
Figure 3: Sentiment expressed towards specified candidates in the by-election – 1/1 – 7/1
In the past week, the Liberal Democrats’ Elwyn Watkins had the highest proportion of negative mentions at 15.8% with the Conservative’s Kashif Ali at 10.3% and Labour’s Debbie Abrahams at 1.5%. In terms of favourable comment, Abraham’s led with 39.7%, Watkins stood at 34.2% and Ali at 19%.
Just imagine – your latest Twitter campaign is covered by the mainstream media – good times. Not quite if you’re Vodafone and protestors have hijacked your feel-good campaign to protest alleged tax avoidance.
A couple of weeks ago, we covered a number of protests at Vodafone stores, triggered by the group UKuncut which mobilised through Twitter. The protestors claimed that Vodafone had not paid a £6bn tax bill.
It seems that Vodafone still hasn’t put out the social media firestorm. So, what’s been going on?
Well, it’s been running a campaign under #makesmesmile to invite people to tweet what makes them smile and some handsets have been up for grabs.
Critics have described the campaign as a massive PR own goal. People have been used the tag to get their tax message across and they have appeared unmoderated on Vodafone’s website. The blog coffee.paper.trend has talked of a: ‘Massive PR #fail by Vodafone who have invited people to tweet what makes them smile.’
But, the brand still has some advocates over the issue.
There’s no doubt that tax protestors have had a field day with Vodafone #makesmesmile. Philip Green’s Top Shop and Kraft have all also been targeted over their tax positions and today social media is still red hot with comment about both the phone and retail brand @#UKuncut.
At the beginning of November, news that an engine had blown on a Qantas Airbus A380 flight from Singapore just minutes after take-off triggered a dismal month for the engine maker, Rolls Royce. In the past few weeks, we monitored over 5,000 mentions of the social discussion around Rolls Royce, its failed Trent 900 engine and the damage to its reputation.
We also picked up an interesting secondary discussion on the way Qantas managed the crisis in the first few hours of the disaster. Passengers on the Qantas flight immediately tweeted news of the emergency landing. So, for the airline, what was the role of social media in communicationg what had actually happened?
Figure 1: Sentiment expressed towards Rolls Royce in the discussion around engine failure – 25/10 to 23/11
Looking at the Rolls Royce discussion, there were three, unsurprising stand-out peaks in negative sentiment. The first spike on 5 November was driven by speculation on Twitter that an engine design flaw by Rolls Royce caused the Qantas plane to make an emergency landing.
The second peak on 8 November was driven by confirmation from the Australian airline that it had found anomalies on three additional engines across its fleet – heaping more woes on Rolls Royce.
The biggest spike was on 12 November when the company confirmed that it had identified the component that caused the engine blowout and also said that the issue could hit profit growth.
The engine makers’ reputation was damaged. But, throughout the period, Rolls Royce was assertive in communicating the action it was taking on engine safety as momentum around the crisis grew on all channels.
What about Qantas? On 4 November, Crisisblogger posted: ‘Oh boy, this is what we in crisis communication in the age of citizen journalists and instant social media have been talking about’.
The blogger acknowledged the airline got many things right when news broke but was critical of the fact it did not make a response on Twitter where it could have responded to early rumours and reports – ‘for the news media tuning in to Twitter for the latest updates, Qantas should have been there’. Nor did it use other channels such as Facebook or communicate through their website ‘at least they would have been part of the stream’. But, none of this would not damage its reputation.
A reply to the post by J.D. pointed out Quantas may not have had ‘verifiable information to share at the same pace that the passengers were tweeting/posting’ and the number one priority was the safety of its passengers.
This was supported by another comment: ‘JD – I agree. While Twitter is critical; there are so many moving parts in a crisis that need to be considered that pulling a trigger too soon can have dangerous or unintended consequences’.
What are your thoughts on how companies should use social media to communicate or respond to a major news story?
