Qantas’ decision to lock-out employees and ground planes as part of a pay dispute with unions has been a big topic of discussion on twitter in the last 24 hours.
Using the same technique that I used to analyse the public reaction to the carbon tax, I have looked at the last 1500 tweets (as of 12:30 this afternoon) to see how people on Twitter are reacting.
The following graph shows that while tweets are predominantly neutral, the numbers are stronger on the negative than the positive side. Turns out people don’t like getting stuck at the airport.
This could be bad news for Qantas management in their quest to win over the public in their battle with unions.
Update A few people have asked on twitter if these reactions are positive or negative for Qantas or the unions or both – I simply used the term ‘qantas’, so people who are expressing a negative view towards the unions position on Qantas could be included here too.
Picking the last 1500 tweets from a random time of day does not make this a representative sample, but it’s probably more representative than your or my timeline.
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Hi Tom,
You’re right about the complexities of sentiment analysis, it can take quite a lot of detailed work to refine the results to accurately reflect the true sentiment.
We’ve done quite a lot of this “social business intelligence” work, and I recently also wrote a post on the Qantas grounding which you might find interesting http://igo2group.com.au/blog/will-qantas-now-take-the-social-business-leap/
Walter @adamson
Hi Walter,
Thanks for sharing. I think something of particular interest in your analysis was the element of ‘influence’.
It would be interesting re-running this analysis, taking into account people’s Klout scores as a measure of influence to see how influential the commenters were.
Tom