On a Tuesday morning in September 2011, we at Bell Pottinger Digital held a collaboration meeting with The Straits Times' Political Desk in our Suntec City office to conceive and design a social media research project that would prove to be challenging and ambitious.
At first, the task seemed straightforward. Analyse how politicians use social media in Singapore. Simple enough.
The team had already done "social media scanning” and “thematic analysis” on the Presidential election few months back. Why not use the frameworks and techniques which we had used for the previous project?
Not quite!
Within 20 minutes of brainstorming, we soon discovered that the research project was more complex than we thought at first, and the analysis would need to be robust.
That meant we could not simply rely on technology platforms alone, but would require an overwhelming abundance of “human analytics"; that is the ability to cluster, interpret and analyse sentiments based on social, cultural and political nuances which machines would not be capable of.
The discussion went on for two hours, during which coffee cups were emptied a couple of times. We redrew the mind maps between 15 and 20 times.
From one that looked like a fishbone skeleton, we progressed to a Ishikawa diagram that resembled Paul the Octopus of the 2010 FIFA World Cup fame.
I could see the excitement and apprehension in people’s eyes at the thought of the sheer amount of hard work needed to come up with easy-to-digest frameworks needed for interpretation. We were sure that no one had done a similar study on the scale and scope that our friends at ST had planned.
Over the course of the project, we encountered many "snowballs." Data collection, archiving and coding proved a real challenge.
The more than 5,600 posts, 43,000 comments, 1,600 tweets on the MPs’ Facebook pages and Twitter accounts during the four-month study period from June to October 2011 proved to be manageable data sets.
Key Challenge
However, a key challenge arose when we had to start categorising data into clusters such as negative, positive and neutral. The trends, pattern of usage and response were all derived using programs and algorithms, but to determine the essence of the posts and the sentiments, a different kind of analysis was needed.
A machine cannot detect sarcasm, nor can it ascertain that certain negative words are in fact words of support defending a politician or his position.
The qualitative aspect soon became the challenge and at one point, turned into an organisational nightmare. Unlike typical exploratory and inferential analysis, social media and unstructured data analysis is quite different.
The first step is validating the data sources and the data itself. Secondly, you need to try to have a contextual understanding of the data set and identify all relevant variables needed for the analysis.
Building meaningful dimensions for analysis is the next step and this is the point where the subject expertise comes into play. We started with five dimensions to understand the nature of postings of the MPs initially, which expanded to nine after the preliminary analysis.
Contextual sentiment analysis is the key, but an equally difficult task is to design metrics for comparison. Metrics which are simple yet powerful. The "buzz" and comments to post ratios are all different ways to meaningfully interpret the data and impactful enough for an ordinary citizen. For medium-large scale projects of this sort, you really need a good team.
That said, our teams were up to the task and soon, an army of Bell Pottinger Digital consultants dived deep into hundreds of hours of analytics and data streams, resulting in interesting insights into politicians’ different approaches to connecting with their constituents.
They shed new light on the meaning of digital grassroots, with traditional grassroots campaigning and advocacy work getting exponential amplification through the waves of social media.
Many hours were spent identifying patterns and statistics, and even more hours decoding the trends and behaviours of our test subjects.
As a result, we have the frameworks, indices and measurability indicators to begin to tell the story of how social media is undeniably a permanent part of political life in Singapore.
Avish was the lead consultant for The Straits Times-Bell Pottinger study on MPs’ use of social media in Singapore.
Read also:
http://www.straitstimes.com/SaturdaySpecialReport/Story/STIStory_755282.html