State of The Twittersphere: How #SOTU Played On Twitter

2 Comment(s) | Posted Jan 27, 2010 by Zach Clayton

Zach Clayton

On Wednesday night, the staff of the Emerging Media Research Council analyzed Twitter activity surrounding the State of the Union.  Our headline conclusions are:

• Both Gov. Bob McDonnell and President Obama missed a major social media opportunity: calling on Americans to text or tweet money to Haiti.  
• The majority of Twitter activity that referenced the State of the Union did not express opinions about the President's performance.  Of the content that did reference his performance, 47% was negative and 53% was positive.
• The party committees had a relatively low volume of Tweets, and only a few members of Congress actually Tweeted during the speech.

Twitter Sentiment

Three Ships Media reviewed 500 Tweets selected at random from a data pull of content containing search terms and hashtags relevant to the State of the Union. Staff manually coded the favorability or unfavorability of these Tweets (even the most advanced natural language sentiment mining applications have low levels of accuracy). Of the Tweets reviewed, 18.6% expressed negative sentiment, 21.2% expressed positive sentiment, and 60.2% were neutral or did not express either positive or negative sentiment.

Party Committee Activity

The Republican National Committee (RNC) was the most active participant on Twitter during the speech (posting 17x) compared to the Democratic National Committee (posting 2x).  Among the party committees, there was relatively little activity: the National Republican Senatorial Committee posted 0x, the National Republican Congressional Committee posted 1x, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee posted 1x.  The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee tweeted 6x and was ReTweeted 108x by 11pm EST (a ReTweet occurs when a Twitter follower repeats a Tweet, amplifying its impact); none of the other three Congressional campaign committees received any ReTweets.

Traditional Media Twitter Activity

Although most news stations directed viewers to their Web sites for streaming coverage, none of the network anchors provided Twitter coverage of the speech.   Brian Williams and Diane Sawyer are not on Twitter; Katie Couric (@katiecouric) did not Tweet during the speech.  Certain reporters did tweet, for example, NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd tweeted 31x during the speech.  Fox White House correspondent Major Garrett tweeted 27x during the speech.  Among niche political publications, @Politico did not Tweet, @Hotline tweeted only 2x, and @TheDailyCaller tweeted 8x. 

Team's Selected Tweets

• Silly: @JasonintheHouse [Cong. Jason Chaffetz]: Walked over to say hi to John Kerry. He's been very nice to me.
• Banal: @JoeLieberman [Sen. Joe Lieberman]: This is a big speech for the President at a difficult moment in his presidency.
• Absurd: @MajoratWH [Fox's Major Garrett]: I apologize. Bit.ly turned my original link to SOTU excerpts to a soft-porn link. NOT my intention. http://bit.ly/d6WZBu
• "R" Partisanship Award: @virginiafoxx [Cong. Virginia Foxx]: SOTU not inspiring. People are asking "where's the beef". Talk is cheap. Need more than rhetoriic [sic]
• "D" Partisanship Award: @SenChrisDodd [Sen. Chris Dodd]: I only hope my Republican colleagues use this moment as an opportunity to re-think their strategy of mindless obstructionism.

Filed under: Online Communities, Social Media in Politics, Twitter-related