An Election Revolution

Tracking voting intentions in real time has now been made possible for politicians and the general public with PeopleBrowsr’s new web app Election.ly.

It’s about time we had another way of watching ‘worms’ and polls when we want to know the sentiment of a country in the lead up to and during a Federal election.

Converting Twitter conversations into real-time data means that candidates will no longer have to wait for long and drawn out polling to be complete before they have an idea of which ways voters are swinging; knowing if their policy is going to get the winning vote and how the electorate is responding to their campaigns in general.

Making use of PeopleBrowsr’s access to the Twitter Full Firehose,Election.ly can show voters sentiment across political areas such as preferred Prime Minister, preferred Party and policy debate.

So, how does it work? Election.ly analyses each tweet for positive and negative keywords and can even detect sarcasm -- in what may seem like a positive tweet, but actually isn’t. The number of “for” and “against” tweets creates a score which is graphically shown on a series of dials.

But Election.ly isn’t just for candidates, it has been created with the needs of the electorate in mind. Anyone can view the site and instantly see the sentiment for a particular leader, party or policy. Election.ly utilises the geo-tagging meta data within each tweet.

Being fully interactive, users can click to see the latest tweets from leaders and from each major party and cast their ‘social vote’ for their preferred leader and party by sending a tweet without having to leave the site.

The policy debate section graphically shows which issues are currently trending within the electorate using a ‘tag cloud’. Any issues within the cloud can then be clicked on for a full Twitter stream of the latest thoughts about that topic. Users can add their thoughts by tweeting from within the site.

Election.ly will become the first go to place for pundits, politicians and the general population when they want to know the sentiment of the country.