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How did a SA company correctly predict Brexit?

While many UK residents are still reeling at the shock that it will indeed be leaving the European Union, one South African company is (somewhat) rejoicing.

Sentiment-driven media analytics company BrandsEye managed to correctly predict the outcome of the referendum – in spite of analysts, exit polls and pundits claims towards the contrary.

But how did the company manage to get it right? Well, it used the tried and tested formula of scouring social media for opinions.

“BrandsEye used its unique human-powered sentiment analysis on a large sample of online referendum commentary, which led to a surprising result – most Brits were in favour of leaving the EU,” the company said in a media statement.

CEO of the company, JP Kloppers, explained that it started to gather information on which way people were going to vote a few days before the polls opened.

“In the days running up to the vote, we analysed a sample of 10 000 mentions representing half a million opinions across a range of social media platforms, and found that 56.9% of the opinions expressed were in favour of Brexit, contrary to the results of most of the polls conducted at the time.”

Kloppers explained exactly how it was done: BrandsEye doesn’t make use of algorithms for social media analysis, but instead has humans go through the data gathered by the company’s software.

“With our unique crowd-sourcing approach to sentiment analysis, BrandsEye used people to understand the referendum commentary. Every online comment was independently analysed by several trained contributors to create a 95% confidence level with a 2.5% margin of error, an unheard of amount of precision in media analysis.”

But is the use of social media a reliable source for sentiment? Kloppers seems to think so.

“It is no longer a refuge for the angrily opinionated. It seems to talk for the ‘silent majority’ as well. In addition, there is no larger source of public opinion. With accurate analysis, social media performs better than polls in understanding the true sentiment in a population, which is not surprising given the much larger samples involved,” he said.

Interested in the upcoming presidential elections in the US? Well, better keep up to date with BrandsEye, as it will be doing the same for the US elections.

“In the run up to the US presidential election, social media analysis will become more important than ever. We clearly cannot trust only the polls and the pundits – if we can accurately understand the general opinion across the population, we’ll be less likely to be surprised again,” he concluded.

[Image – CC by 2.0/harry_nl]

 

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