Will Twitter Predict the Seoul Mayor Race?

SEOUL--(Korea Newswire)--On October 26, Seoullites will vote in a special election to decide their new mayor. As progressive alliance candidate Won-soon Park faces off against Gyeong-won Na, representing the incumbent Grand National Party, their supporters are waging an equally-heated battle on the micro blogging service Twitter.

Koreans are posting more than 60,000 tweets about the election every day, and the two candidates have more than 170,000 combined followers, according to Daumsoft, a Seoul-based online market research firm that is watching the election closely.

Daumsoft, which has developed technology to gather and accurately analyze billions of online comments on topics ranging from cell phones to stem cells, has set up a special web dashboard that lets people track what’s being said by and about the candidates on Twitter.

Visitors to http://campaign.socialmetrics.co.kr can see the relative amount of chatter about a candidate over the past several days, hours, or even minutes. The site also shows which candidate is more popular in each of Seoul’s 26 districts, aggregates tweets about important issues, and even breaks down tweets about candidates by the gender of the poster.

Koreans are prolific social media pundits, sharing their thoughts on everything from political issues to celebrities to favorite products. Daumsoft precisely tracks real-time changes in online opinion, allowing the company to see new trends as they emerge.

“Social media both shapes and reflects consumer and voter opinion in Korea. This is why the ability to analyze billions of online opinions is such a powerful tool for politicians and companies alike,” said Kyoung-seo Kim, Ph.D., Daumsoft‘s CEO. “In the future, we see Daumsoft’s techniques being very useful for understanding what people want from political leaders and which issues they care about most.”

The Internet has a long history in Korean politics. Many political observers agree that savvy use of popular online forums catapulted underdog Moo-hyun Roh to success in the 2002 presidential election. That was two years before the Internet made a dent in American presidential politics, when it both made and unmade Democratic hopeful Howard Dean.

Daumsoft spun off from portal operator Daum Communication in 2000 and has since focused on finding smarter ways to turn online opinions into actionable business intelligence. The company provides insights and listening platforms covering several languages, including Chinese, English, German, Korean, and Spanish.

“Watching the Seoul mayoral race is our test run for Korea’s 2012 presidential and National Assembly elections, when we expect to see exponentially more tweets covering a broader range of issues,” said Dr. Kim.

SocialMetrics Campaign Tracker: http://campaign.socialmetrics.co.kr

Website: http://www.daumsoft.com

This is a news release distributed by Korea Newswire on behalf of this company.