One of our most popular products is something we call a Conversation Capture. A Conversation Capture is an analysis of the entire blog-based discourse related to a particular subject. Our more advanced products are generally built with the intention of doing comparative analyses between, say, issues or brands or product features/benefits. For a Conversation Capture, we just take a single key concept and look at the discourse related to it in the blogs.
As a followup to our look at the Obama-McCain contest that we published in August, we decided to use this straightforward approach to take a look at a day of blog posts about Sarah Palin.
We built the dataset using posts from Monday, October 20 (840 posts total). This was the Monday following Palin’s appearance on Saturday Night Live. Our assumption going in was that the discussion about that would completely dominate.
What we found, however, was very interesting:
Conversation Capture - Sarah Palin - Oct 20
As you can see in the Lexical Map, there was a large discussion about SNL, but there was also a very large discussion about an interview Palin gave with the Christian Broadcasting Network, in which she discussed a Constitutional Amendment that would prevent states from recognizing Gay marriage, among other things. In addition, a lot of attention was given to a speech that Jon Stewart gave in Boston.
Even more interesting, though, was the cluster related to the way Alaska’s oil revenues are distributed. By the end of last week there was quite a bit of discussion about the hypocrisy of Palin’s attacks on Obama as a socialist and Alaska’s oil revenue policies – but here we see that even on that Monday, the issue was clearly emerging in the blogosphere.
One of the other tools we like to use for our Conversation Capture is to build a list of word co-occurrences. Here is a sample excerpt:
- Co-Occ
We see here as well that although the word “socialist” does appear often, it was not only used in the context of a description of her attacks on Obama but also related to the oil revenue situation in Alaska. As well, it is clear that her position on gay marriage is significant – more significant than Joe the Plumber, for sure.