MOSCOW, September 16 (RIA Novosti) - The Rossiya Segodnya Research Center and the Brand Analytics monitoring system have launched a project to monitor the Scottish independence referendum updates in social media.
The project will involve an analysis of English-language referendum-related posts from Scottish users on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LiveJournal and other social media.
“Social networks are becoming an accurate reflection of public opinion – that of an active audience, one that does not just describe and comment on events in the social media, but is one of the active voters with a clear civic stance,” said Yelena Slinko, head of the Rossiya Segodnya Research Center. “Therefore, monitoring the audience’s response on social networks is very important for understanding various social processes.”
According to Slinko, social networks monitoring projects draw user interest partly because the readership of our news website and social media users are often the same audience. Any information “about oneself” is interesting because it provides a different opinion snapshot in addition to surveys and polls.
“In most countries social media users make up 50%-80% of the population and reflect the public opinion accurately enough,” said Natalia Sokolova who leads the Brand Analytics project. “At the same time, the social media are the environment in which information and ideas spread fast. Using 'real-time' social research in addition to standard sociology methods can help generate more accurate and prompt voting forecasts.”
The Scottish independence referendum will take place on September 18.
Brand Analytics is a social media monitoring and analysis system that serves major research centers, government agencies and corporations. The system performs real-time selection and analysis of public reports in social media.
