"You Lie!"

Obama's speech helped in grabbing back some of the initiative in the debate around health care; however, Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst during the speech sidelined much of the impact as people's discussion focused on that topic rather than the more substantive issues. We'll analyze the topics of discussion as well as follow up on last week's post, The Raging Debate, examining: the shifts in advocacy around the 2 key policy arguments of public (single payer) and private insurance and take a peek at the discussion on Twitter.

WEEKLY POSTS

The overall volume of conversation around health care declined from it's peak in August as the town hall meetings conducted during Congress' summer recess ended and people's passion waned (it's still up 50% since the beginning of June so lots of passion but not the fevered pitch of August).

UPDATE ON ADVOCACY

SHARE OF ADVOCACY

MotiveQuest has found statistically significant links between shifts in the change and advocacy and change in market share in categories including: automotive, cellular and spirits.

In our work across categories we've seen strong correlation between shifts in advocacy and shifts in category share and toward that goal, we're comparing the 2 key policy choices and seeing a fairly dramatic shift in advocacy share towards private insurance options. It's clear that the outcome of the summer debate has shaped the current house bill with significant concessions in the public option and a focus on private insurance, which continues to gain momentum. With the release from committee of the Senate Health Care Proposal only yesterday it'll be interesting in our follow-up analysis to see which bill generates the most advocacy.

THE SPEECH

Other studies of online word of mouth have suggested that President Obama was losing control and momentum of the discussion and examining the topical drivers in the first week (technically 10 days) of September vs. August we can see that there were drops in the primary drivers of reform for high cost and insuring the uninsured, with a continued increase in discussion of Tort Reform showing that the discussion had shifted away from the Democratic Platform.

Also, noteworthy is the decrease in discussion around rationing ("death panels"), the town hall discussions and subsequent clarification (or maybe it was a policy change) has had the effect of cooling people's concerns.

DRIVERS & TOPICS

WHAT ABOUT TWITTER?

We also pulled down nearly 10,000 posts per day from Twitter on health care (from the time after Obama's speech through yesterday) , and I am frankly surprised at the amount of content packed into 140 characters. We did a simple look at the top words associated with health care and created topic themes, the conversation is indeed substantive and shows people sharing both news / information about health care and advocating through their social network using twitter.

A final interesting feature of the twitter conversation was people's discussion of Kanye's outburst on the VMA's, with comparisons to that of Rep. Wilson as well as disappointment that Kanye's outburst would remove media focus from the health care debate.

TWITTER WORDS & TOPICS

Please leave a comment if you have questions, we'll do our best to clarify.

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