Twitter analysis during Canada election campaign helping parties build strategy

Political campaigns are driven by strategists, pollsters and spin doctors — but physicists, mathematicians and statisticians are also in high demand this election season.

Right now, Ottawa company Advanced Symbolics is tracking Twitter traffic to draw out information about voter attitudes and intentions.

CEO Erin Kelly said her company looks at Twitter posts from a wide range of ages, incomes, regions and religions to analyze issues that resonate and to figure out how and when opinion changes.

She believes their analysis is more accurate than the polls.

"They can't game our system because we're looking at everything they post. Everything they follow and retweet."

Kelly said every major party is collecting and applying its own data analytics, but based on her company's research, no one is using it quite as strategically as the Conservative Party.

"When I see what they're doing and I look at the analytics, it's bang on to the point of genius," she said.

Analysis provides 'early warning system'

Kelly believes the prolonged discussion on the issue of the niqab was no mistake — it's been part of the strategy based on the data.

"It's very obvious that the Conservatives have a great analytics engine. We've seen that whether it's the budget or issues like the niqab," said Kelly.

"What we've been able to determine from our analysis is that those demographics weren't going to vote for them anyway, so they're not afraid to alienate them."

It's very obvious that the Conservatives have a great analytics engine.- Erin Kelly, Advanced Symbolics

Deep dives in data analysis aren't new. The first computer used to predict the outcome of an election was the Univac computer in the 1952 U.S. presidential race.

Some 60 years later, the analytics are faster — and much more exact.

Shahzad Khan, co-founder and chief technology officer at Ottawa's Gnowit, is one of the brains trying to turn the fine art of politics into a finer science.

His company builds artificial intelligence applications that could be a political strategist's dream — analyzing thousands of media articles and blogs a minute.

"What we give them is an early warning system. We can tell them there's something they can potentially exploit," Khan said.

"The real art is when you take the data and make the predictions much more systemic — and that's what we're attempting to do."

5M election-related tweets

During this campaign, Twitter itself is doing some analysis.

Steve Ladurantaye, head of news and government partnerships at Twitter Canada said so far, there have been five million election-related tweets.

"We're trying to understand what topics are moving around, making the most impact," said Ladurantaye.

He said his team is also working directly with all the political parties.

We're trying to understand what topics are moving around, making the most impact.- Steve Ladurantaye

"We help them do Twitter events and help them put out their platform. We've done a lot of a lot of account training, sitting with hundreds of candidates at a time helping them use their Twitter accounts in the early days of the campaign." 

Ladurantaye said all the parties are using Twitter a bit differently: the Conservatives underscore policy and the Liberals are trying to reach younger voters.

He said the NDP is a blend of the two, but that it's the Green Party's Elizabeth May that is capitalizing on the power of Twitter by engaging directly with Canadians.

Analysts predict a Liberal Ottawa

It is that engagement and those Twitter conversations that feed data crunchers like Rob Davidson, a stay-at-home dad and open source data analyst.

He has drilled down to the local level, building graphs that detail how many people are following Ottawa-area candidates in real time.

But he said his heavy-lifting will come after the election.

"What I want to do with this particular set of Twitter information is use it to build a model that can be used for social media-based information to predict election results in future elections," he said.

Davidson said he has enough confidence in his current data to predict that six of Ottawa's eight ridings will be won by the Liberals, and that the Conservatives and NDP will each will one seat. 

That matches what Kelly and the team at Advanced Symbolics are seeing — a Liberal win.

But for all these data crunchers, the work is just getting started.  After all, they'll need the intelligence for the next election.