Australia’s Innovation Statement Blitz’s Social

The release of the Australian Prime Minister’s Innovation Statement yesterday caused a burst of optimistic excitement in social media, and it’s still on a roll.

Not long anticipated but well anticipated

Malcolm Turnbull, the new Australian Prime Minister who is fond of tweeting selfies while on public transport, further distanced himself from his colleague who he disposed barely 3 months ago (see our Twitter analysis) by releasing his “Innovation Statement” yesterday.

While our previous Prime Minister was renowned for being backward-looking and essentially technology-illiterate the new man in The Lodge made one his fortunes backing email and other Internet start-ups in the first Internet boom. By drawing on his investment community contacts – those with the first hand knowledge – and his hand-picked experts from the Public Service – he delivered an Innovation Statement within 90 days of being in office. That in itself is a rather remarkable outcome for a complex topic.

Ninety-percent of the online commentary was on Twitter and nearly twice as many males as females commented.

The News was almost all positive

Although there were a few News articles critical of the innovation statement it is unusual in our analysis system – Sysomos MAP – to see such a large positive sentiment.

This assessment is performed by Natural Language Processing which has an overall accuracy of about 80% for US English. In this case it determined that a massive 82% of the online News was positive about the Innovation Statement. We’re more used to seeing both positive and negative in the range of 10 to 20% for most issues.

Below is a item from the News with Sysomos’s interpretation of the sentiment of key parts of the article, and you can see that the assessment of sentiment for those parts is quite accurate.

Therefore, from a political point of view the Government should be very pleased with the outcome of their announcement as most commentators are.

Who were the main camps in the Twitter commentary?

Going back to Twitter our analysis allows us to identify the main “camps” of people who rallied around the buzz, which interestingly had its own hashtag #ideasboom. The Twitter Nation was much more diverse in its views of the merits of the Innovation Statement and in fact the most popular tweet over the period of our analysis was a distinctly negative one.

Community analysis allows us to see how those tweeting about an issue are connected with each other. From this we can find “camps” of those who are independently passionate or connected with news outlets or political groupings for example.

In this case we can observe that the Prime Minister sits as a kind of bridge or link between the brown cluster at the top and the green cluster to the right. It turns out that the brown cluster contains the financial press and business commentators, and the green cluster contains mainstream news organisations and their staff, and many politicians. It’s a mathematical verification of how Malcolm Turnbull spans these two worlds.

Summary

All up the Innovation Statement delivered the goods for the Prime Minister who is still on a popularity high with most of the community. The buzz was strong and the sentiment positive, especially in the online News.

With a reach of 77m in the first 24 hours from nearly 8,000 different Twitter users the announcement certainly tickled the fancy of those who should be most passionate about it.