Data analysis of Twitter reaction to the Carbon Tax

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Tom

I was interested to see how people on twitter were reacting to the Government’s carbon announcement. The government has been taking a bashing in the polls, but I wanted to see how things were looking from a social media perspective.

To perform this analysis I used R an awesome stats language, a ‘sentiment-lexicon’ from Hu & Liu and the method described in this powerpoint by Jeffrey Breen.

Essentially what I did was download the most recent 1,500 tweets that contained the phrase ‘carbon tax’ and cross-referenced them against two lists of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ words. Then, each tweet was given a score according to how positive or negative it was. The more positive words, the higher the score.

The following graph shows the spread of people’s reactions:

So what does this mean?

As you can see, the highest number of people (575) have had a neutral reaction i.e. their tweet contained neither positive nor negative words.

The reaction on the positive side is stronger than on the negative. More people seem to be passionately positive about the carbon tax than passionately negative. If you just look at those people that have had a strong reaction (very positive or very negative) the reaction is pro carbon tax with 219 very positive, and only 125 very negative. This may be good news for the government.

However in total the ledger is quite even, with slightly more people negative than positive. There were 492 tweets that were negative, and 433 that were positive.

To give you an idea of the sort of things both the very positive and very negative tweeters have been saying, I made these two tag clouds (ooh pretty ). Unsurprisingly, fear and anger feature heavily on the negative side and much kinder emotions on the positive.

What do you think?

So what do you think about the carbon tax and this analysis? Does the spread of emotion represent what you are hearing? I’d love to hear your thoughts so @tweet me or leave a comment.

Disclaimer: This analysis is far from scientific. The last 1500 tweets are not representative of any significant sample size. They’re just the limit of twitter’s search API. The word list is subjective, and not a comprehensive way of performing sentiment analysis.

However, it is interesting and does give you a picture of how people are talking about the carbon tax on twitter.

Pursuing innovative change in the public service

Posted on June 26, 2011 by Tom

Recently at work we launched the Skilled Migration Blog – it’s our attempt to get some facts out there in the debate on skilled migration in Australia.

I’m excited about being a part of changing the way such a large organisation communicates.

SThis post is about the lessons I learned driving through an innovative change in a large public service organisation.

So here are my top 6 tips on innovation in large organisations:

You have to be passionate.
It helps to have company.
You’ll need an executive level champion.
It will take longer than you think. Relax.
Don’t piss anyone off.
Spread the love.

You have to be passionate

If you are not convinced that your idea will make a huge difference, no-one else will be. Give up now if you don’t think this idea is worth the trouble.

It helps to have company

As readers of this blog will be aware, I’m a huge fan social media and blogging. Luckily for me I work with someone else who is too (Henry).

One person going on about social media looks like a nut, two people starts to look like consensus.

So, if you are looking to pursue change in a large organisation, convince one of your colleagues first.

You’ll need an executive level champion

I am lucky to work with a director and branch head who are willing to take some risks.

We managed to get our branch head’s ear over lunch one day and convinced him that the blog would be a great idea.

Once we had that executive level buy-in we were able to get stuff done. Without it the blog would still be a pipe dream.

If you have decent executive staff in your area, convince them that your idea is awesome. If you don’t, and you want to be innovative, it’s time to look for a new job.

It will take longer than you think. Relax.

How long can it take to get a wordpress blog up? Much longer than I thought. From start to finish it took us six months.

Take the amount of time you think your change should take, triple it, and then stop worrying about it.

Don’t piss anyone off

If you’re trying to change something in a big organisation, you’ll come up against people who don’t like it.

This is a fact of life. If you deal with this by

getting surly in meetings
sending these people passive-aggressive emails or
going to their bosses to cut them out of the loop

then you’re going to piss people off.

Pissed off people won’t help you. So stay cool, vent to your team mates and then be a professional when you’re dealing with the gate-keepers.

Spread the love

Make sure when you succeed that you are ‘hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise’. Thank everyone that helped you and give people credit for their good ideas.

Chances are they’ll be ready to help next time you have some ‘genius idea’.

Fairfax, Paywalls and the Public Sector Informant

Posted on April 10, 2011 by Tom

My mate Henry (@henrysherrell) posted an interesting article on his blog recently about the fact that Fairfax won’t publish their ‘Public Sector Informant’ online.

To quote Henry:

The Public Sector Informant is a weekly lift out from the Canberra Times about issues regarding the Australian Public Service and public policy. Unique in a major broadsheet paper, it is filled with serious discussion about policy implementation, advice from career bureaucrats and how government operates in society.

Obviously Fairfax think that publishing the PSI online would reduce purchasing of the Canberra Times and therefore cost them money. As Henry points out this comes at the expense of providing a lot of public servants (and others) with access to what is a quality publication simply because they don’t buy paper versions of the newspaper. Henry goes on to suggest that Fairfax should publish the PSI online for the good of man kind – very noble of him indeed.

I believe that instead Fairfax should look at the PSI in a similar way as they do to the Fin. Review which sits behind a paywall. Early experience on pay walls (the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Review suggests that when the information is valuable to people, and is not just generic news they can get anywhere, they are prepared to pay. I think that the PSI fits this criteria.

I also think that Fairfax should have a look at the way the New York Times are deploying their new paywall. The new NYT pay wall has been described as a ‘pay hedge’ – i.e. you can have limited access to articles, they can be shared with other people, but if you want to read the NYT a lot (more than 20 articles a month), you have to pay. Find out more here.

So here’s what I think that fairfax should do with the PSI:

Put it up online behind an NYT style ‘pay hedge’ where I can share articles with other interested public servants/random people if I’m a subscriber to grow interest in the PSI, but Fairfax can still charge subscribers.
Create a strong community section on the new PSI web site that fosters discussion and engagement by people interested in public policy (as opposed to just politics) in Australia. This will help to create a strong value proposition for this online product – and it will be something more than exists in the paper version.
Create a bulk/organisational licence and agressively market this to public service agencies/academia/political parties so that organisations rather than individuals are paying for it. I am sure that this is what the Fin. Review is currently doing with banks/finance firms.

I think this could create a strong win/win when it comes to the PSI. For Fairfax they could be monetizing something that is just rotting in paper currently – and for the reader, a lot of interesting articles on public policy available beyond the small geographical confines of the ACT.

Jonathan Holmes & Media Watch contradictory on free speech

Posted on April 5, 2011 by Tom

On last night’s episode of Media Watch Jonathan Holmes gave implied support for a bill of rights protecting free speech in Australia.

In relation to Andrew Bolt being sued under Clause 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act Holmes stated:

There’s an irony here. Many countries have a Bill of Rights or a Constitution that gives freedom of speech the status of a fundamental right (…) Clause 18C of Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act would probably never have become law in the United States. And in the UK, a judge would have to weigh it in the balance against a legally-recognised right to free speech.

Jonathan Holmes – Media Watch 04/04/11

Holmes is obviously of the view that having a law to protect free speech would be a good thing and would prevent laws being created that would restrict speech.

This is interesting when you consider Holmes’ view on speech as it relates to commentary on climate change. In this case Holmes supports the use of government authority to restrict speech:

Commercial radio is supposedly governed by Codes of Practice enforceable by the regulator, ACMA (…) it says licensees must ensure that

reasonable efforts are made … to present significant viewpoints when dealing with controversial issues of public importance…

— Commercial Radio Australia, Codes of Practice and Guidelines, 19 February, 2010

(…) As we’ve seen, there are requirements for accuracy and diversity of view in Code of Practice No 2. The problem is, the regulator won’t or can’t enforce the Code unless someone complains it’s being flouted.

So it would seem that Holmes would like to have his cake and eat it too on Government regulation of speech.

I personally don’t believe that a bill of rights is required to protect free speech. If we as a community decide that the Racial Discrimination Act goes too far in restricting speech, we can simply change the act through our representatives in parliament. And that’s the way it ought to be.

Something Scott Morrison got right

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Tom

I may not agree with many of Scott Morrison’s views – but I will give him credit for this, someone in his office understands the Internet. In my last post, I outlined that Labor’s online presence is not goal driven and Labor is therefore missing out on valuable memberships/email signups/other awesome stuff.

So now I would like to provide an example of an Australian politician who is getting it right.

Political landing page done right: http://www.scottmorrison.com.au

Once you land on Scott Morrison’s page, you are greeted with this splash page, which invites you to sign up to his regular newsletter, follow him on twitter or join him on facebook – or alternatively keep going through to his normal website.

Why is this a good example of a political landing page?

It achieves something. Scott Morrison would like you to hear his message, so he asks you to sign up to the channels he communicates through. It’s not a bunch of random information, it is a few Calls To Action that will make you do what he wants.
It’s ‘spatially aware’. The form requests your postcode. This will allow Morrison’s office to send out information that is relevant to his electorate in one email, while not boring everyone else on his mailing list with pictures of Scott Morrison kissing babies at a supermarket opening in Cronulla.
It is clean and simple. There’s no flash. Just Scott’s beautiful mug, and some links. You don’t get confused or annoyed by some slow loading intro page.
It’s easy to go through to the main page, you don’t feel like he is trying to trick you.
The rest of his website is good too.

By having a simple, goal driven web site, Scott Morrison will be able to communicate directly to his constituents and other interested members of the public. That is a political win no matter how you look at it.