Obama’s 3rd SOTU – the Reaction Across Twitter

On January 24th, President Obama delivered his third State of the Union Address to a Joint Session of Congress.  This speech like many State of the Unions (SOTU) before it, focused mainly on the rising income inequality occurring in the US and other economic issues. In an important election year for Obama, this speech is likely to lay the groundwork for the messaging Obama will deliver across America for the months ahead.  But just how well received was the speech and what level of communication did the speech inspire on Twitter?

Before, during, and after Obama’s SOTU, Topsy Labs conducted sentiment analysis and calculated the total number of mentions on Twitter for both Obama and the widely used hashtag for the event #SOTU.

As would be expected, the majority of conversation around the speech was right before President Obama started speaking and trailed off over the next few hours after the speech.  This is shown in the chart above which depicts the total number of mentions by minute for both Obama and #SOTU. Obama reached his peak number of tweets at the 9:50 mark (with 13,142 mentions). This peak represents the Twitter reaction to Obama’s speech. What is very interesting about this is by utilizing the time mark, we are able to easily determine what Obama was speaking about at 9:50 PM that sparked the most number of mentions. Not surprisingly the highest number of mentions was a result of Obama’s attempt at humor:

“We got rid of one rule from 40 years ago that could have forced some dairy farmers to spend $10,000 a year proving that they could contain a spill – because milk was somehow classified as an oil. With a rule like that, I guess it was worth crying over spilled milk.”

The highest number of mentions for #SOTU (12,265), occurring at 9:37 PM, was most likely a reaction to Obama’s remarks about immigration and women’s equal pay with his administration putting “more boots on the border than ever before” and that “women should earn equal pay for equal work”.

Did the increase in mentions during the speech lead to a corresponding positive increase in sentiment? Or were the tweets a result of people disagreeing or disliking what Obama was saying? To answer these questions we analyzed a full day’s worth of sentiment for Obama and #SOTU leading up to the speech and a couple of hours following the speech.

As you can see in the graph above, Obama’s sentiment started decreasing from 10 AM the morning of the speech and never really recovered into the positive territory again. Looking in between the orange arrows above, which indicates the time when the speech occurred, that even though volumes were pretty much the same throughout the speech the sentiment diverged. While people were positive/neutral about the #SOTU as a whole, they were on average negative about Obama which may be reflective of people’s perceptions of him (at least the perception of him during the speech).

In contrast, the GOP Response, which is customary after the State of the Union (when a Democrat is President and vice versa when a Republican is in power), did not have nearly the number of mentions as Obama or #SOTU. Over the same time period, we analyzed #SOTUGOP the official Twitter hashtag for the response and #mitchdaniels, the Republican Governor of Indiana. As shown in the chart below #mitchdaniels peaked at 138 mentions and #SOTUGOP peaked at 68 mentions.

And finally, just for fun, using topsy.com (which just shows significant tweets – tweets that are either retweeted or contain links) we compared which is more popular, the SOTU or Apple.  For the past day, Apple with its record breaking earnings call posted 112,000 mentions narrowly beating out the SOTU coming in at 106,000 mentions.  Is it possible discussion of iPads and iPhones is more interesting than a congressionally mandated speech by the leader of the free world? Sounds like something to dive into on a future blog post…

 

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