Social media can be a kind of political poll. A fickle, ever-evolving, often inaccurate poll, but a poll nonetheless.
The stories that dominate Twitter today drive tomorrow's front-page news. And as hard as candidates may try to drive their well-crafted messages on social media, the masses have a mind of their own. If we analyze not just what they're talking about but how they're talking about it, we can learn a lot about the candidates' greatest strengths and weaknesses.
That's why Wayin, a social media intelligence company that uses machine learning technology to understand sentiment online, has been keeping a close eye on how these candidates are being perceived on social media. Using its access to Twitter's firehose, Wayin measures the overall volume of conversation surrounding each candidate, as well as how much of that conversation is positive, which words are used most often in those positive tweets, which words are most often associated with negative tweets, and where the conversation is happening, among other things.
WIRED asked Wayin to pull data from the month of July on the top five candidates in terms of total volume to see what we can learn about the issues that are helping and hurting each one. Click through the gallery above to see which surprising (and not so surprising) issues driving the campaigns. And yes, there will be pancakes.
