UK Councils Monthly Buzz Index – May 2010
Perhaps the snapshot below is a little harsh on students but this tweet sets the tone for the subject which dominated the online news, blogging and tweeting community during May – The Election. We’ll be coming back to this item later.
May Election Tweet
This month we will be continuing to track the usual items:
- Overall growth of online media referring to councils
- The mix of media referencing councils
- The top 5 councils by volume in the County, Unitary and District categories
Please see previous month’s data here.
The first chart shows the total buzz.
May UK Councis total buzz
Nothing too dramatic in the above chart – total buzz continues to trend upwards – but when you consider a growth of 5,500 to 7,500 references to our fixed basket of Tier 1 councils in 6 months this represents an annual growth rate of 75% !
Last month we saw Twitter eclipse News as highest source of mentions to UK Councils online. This trend has continued. Will News catch up again next month or has Twitter taken the lead permanently?
May UK Councis media mix
Lets look now at the top 5 councils in each category – ranked by volume but also showing sentiment.
Top 5 councils by mention by type - May 2010
This month we see many of the same usual suspects – with one exception in Unitaries – Barking and Dagenham.
The next 2 charts show
- a – the overall impact of the election on references to London Borough of Barking & Dagenham during May
- b – the specific references to Nick Griffin as a candidate for Barking & Dagenham – using the CouncilMonitor function to track people terms as well.
May UK Councis Buzz Index - Barking Dagenham
Nick Griffin May Council Index
For those of you with a broader interest across all access channels within councils you may like to know we have also started publishing a UK Councils Customer Access Index March 2010 – based on date from GovMetric – Last month’s is here.
Notes.
Images and chart data may be used provided CouncilMonitor are credited accordingly.
For a more comprehensive service description please look at www.councilmonitor.com/about .
Monthly Buzz Index methodology – Details can be found here
About CouncilMonitor – CouncilMonitor trawls the Internet 24 hours a day, seven days a week, searching through news, blogs, forums and social media sites. It reads through all of this information and summarises what’s being said about UK councils, and can even tell you whether the sentiment is positive or negative (similar to the election worm we have seen at #leadersdebate). The service was launched in December 2009 so is still quite early on, but by measuring a benchmark group of councils on a consistent basis we hope to be able to provide some national trend information relating to what people are saying about their councils – and how they choose to say it.
