What does America think?
Ken and I officially began work today on the first demo version of our intuitionbox by figuring out the specifics of a really interesting project with Nicholas. I will talk more about this project over the coming weeks (it should end up being delivered this summer), but as with many new pieces of work, it began with a really hard question to solve.
We want to capture what Americans think about America today, and how positive they are feeeling about the issues that really matter - the economy, the environment, education and so on. Intuitionbox uses a really smart set of technologies to answer questions exactly like this for major brands, and we are excited to apply that same approach to the brand of America.
The problem is how to ask America. Intuitionbox specializes in analyzing buzz from the leading social media sources - twitter, facebook, bit.ly, Del.ic.ious, etc. The result is that we tend to skew towards technology-adopter, a happy coincidence given that these same people usually have lots of opinions to share on brands and issues.
But if you want to capture the voice of America, scanning twitter just won’t suffice. So where do you go to get the data? We are looking at trying to get transcripts from radio and TV shows featuring a call-in element, and processing those calls for opinion. Its going to be hard, but will be fascinating if we can pull it off.
If you can think of anywhere else we might listen to hear the right voices, please drop me a line. Thinking through this conundrum poses some very serious questions about what twitter really tells us, and the challenges of really understanding public opinion.
