Blogosphere has high predictive value for the Belgian elections

Quite an astonishing press release this week in Belgium. Our friends at Attentio did a blogtracking research in the Belgian blogosphere and concluded that there's a major correlation between the number of conversations about politicians in the Belgian blogosphere on the one hand and electoral success on the other hand. The more conversations about a politician, the higher his success. For foreign readers of this blog: there was quite a controversy around last months elections around the fact that the polls didn't predict the massive loss for the Socialist Party and the relative lost for the reigning Liberal Party. Some opinion makers even stated that polls have a steering power: people start voting in a strategic way, according to rules of thumb such as: "they don't need my vote, because they are doing well. I'll just give an extra vote to those poor bastards that are being bashed in the polls".  

We talked about this predictive value in the past in the post "conversation tracking and what brands can learn from it".

Link: http://kathrien.skynetblogs.be/post/4725565/bloggers-voorspelden-uitslag-10-juni-beter-da