Bloggers Positive About Palin's Resignation

Chalk up another strange twist in the Sarah Palin affair. Just when we thought blogger attacks on the Alaska guv would spike, her surprise resignation is being met with positive blog buzz. Whereas her "Zeta Buzz" was 54 percent negative before her weekend resignation press conference, it has since changed to 69 percent positive, say our friends at Zeta Interactive. Here's what they tell us about Palin:

Over the past few weeks, the blogosphere has been flooded with information—celebrity deaths, rumors, speculation, gossip and commentary. On July 3, another topic made its way into online communities, chat rooms and social networks—the early resignation of the always controversial Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin.

Zeta Interactive, a full service digital marketing agency, used its technology, Zeta Buzz, to find out how Sarah Palin's resignation was being taken online. Zeta Buzz technology uses complicated algorithms to mine the blogosphere and scrape information and data on a specific topic. In this instance, it was used to see whether the volume of posts on Sarah Palin, or her "buzz", went up following the news, and if that buzz was either positive or negative in tone.

As you'll notice in the chart below which tracks the amount of Palin posts over the past month, her volume spiked significantly on the day of her resignation, which was to be expected considering Palin had been rather quiet of late, especially compared to her normal media exposure.

In order to get a clearer picture of the Palin name, Zeta Buzz looked back at the month prior to the resignation (from June 3rd until July 2nd) to see what the tone of those posts were. As evidenced in the chart below, Palin's buzz was poor overall, coming in at 54% negative and 46% positive. It was also at a steady, low volume over this month and it appears that the conversations about Palin had been limited to those dedicated members of online communities.

Following her resignation on July 3rd, activity in the blogosphere spiked dramatically, as did positive posts on the topic of Palin. The past five days has shown a significant increase in positive buzz on the Governor, coming in at 69% Positive and 31% Negative, as shown in the charts below.

"We've seen that people tend to voice their opinions online in large numbers following a specific event and Zeta Buzz technology is able to sort through the thoughts of over 100 million mainstream bloggers to return a sense of public opinion on the matter," said Al DiGuido, CEO of Zeta Interactive. "These people who are actively contributing to the online conversations are becoming some of the most powerful publishers of our time. This Zeta Buzz data provides a detailed snapshot of how people respond to a particular event and it will be interesting to see if the blogosphere remains as temperamental as the media continues to report on new developments."

About Zeta Interactive

Zeta Interactive is a full-service digital marketing agency offering a wide range of services—from email and search marketing, to Web site development, creative services, social media marketing and mining, and more. According to the 2008 Advertising Age Digital Agency Report, the company is currently ranked among the Top 50 digital agencies in the U.S. and 25th among U.S. Search Agencies.

Zeta Interactive is a leading provider of integrated, interactive services that help marketers realize the full potential of the Internet to build brands, increase sales, improve processes, and reduce costs.  The company's specialty is in crafting strategies and programs for marketers that help them acquire, retain, up-sell, cross-sell and win back their customers—cost effectively and efficiently—by leveraging customer data and insight from individual marketing initiatives to drive even more relevant and rewarding exchanges across all media and channels.  The company does so by providing superior proprietary technology and a marketing approach that is focused on accountability, measurability and ROI metrics.

Headquartered in New York City, Zeta Interactive has more than 300 employees worldwide located in California, Florida, Idaho, Nevada, New Jersey, Texas, Rhode Island and India. The company serves more than 200 clients currently, including such world-class companies as Time Inc. and Sony Electronics Inc. For more information please visit: www.zetainteractive.com.