Clinton, McCain Leading Online Race

I was looking at some of the candidates in the US Presidential election through InfluenceMonitor.

John McCain has had a bit of a comeback while Barack Obama has slipped. Senator Clinton seems to be a clear leader in the Democratic field.

Figure 1 shows the 6 candidates’ relative share-of-voice of online media in the last 180 days. Notice how McCain and Clinton have an equal share of the coverage.

Figure 2 shows the 6 candidates’ relative share-of-impact for the same period. Here we can see that McCain’s share of impact is substantially bigger than Senator Clinton’s, reflecting the fact that although they had an almost equal amount of coverage, McCain’s coverage was mainly in more influential media.



When measuring share-of-impact the online voices are weighted according to their influence on the topic analysed. For example: When measured over the last year, NY Times has roughly 186% of the influence of the Washington Post when it comes to the debate on the US presidential election. When measuring share-of-impact a mention in NY Times will thus be counted with a relative weight of 1.86 over that of the Washington Post. Another way to look at it would be to say that a candidate would have to have coverage 19 times in the Washington Post to match the relative share-of-impact of a candidate getting coverage 10 times in the NY Times.

You can follow the graph in near real-time (4 hours delayed) on the Onalytica front page.