VoterTide’s homepage displays the VoterTides Scores (out of 100) of the leading presidential candidates. Screen from votertide.com.
VoterTide, a social media analysis app focused on politics for both Washington insiders and the everyday consumers of news, launched into public beta today. As we first reported on in October, this new company is the product of three experienced entrepreneurs: Jimmy Winter, the brain behind Omaha-based RockDex, Gordon Whitten, the founder of Omaha-based Sojern, and Shannon Schlappi, the founder of Kansas City-based Locker Partner. (Left, Winter, photo from votertide.com, middle, Whitten, photo from facebook.com, and right, Schlappi photo from sched.org.)
With VoterTide, Winter has taken parts of the technology he built to track musicians through RockDex, added to it and applied it to the political space – tracking social media mentions and press coverage of the President of the United States down to the mayors of major metropolitan areas.
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“The engine we’ve built is focused on tracking things people are passionate about,” Winter said in an email interview yesterday.
“My Dad had mentioned to me several times about hearing something on the news and wondering how it effected a politician’s online chatter. ‘I wonder what people are saying about so and so?’ ” Winter said. “If a guy without a Facebook or Twitter account still cares about social media then we’d like to offer the tools to help everyone understand it in both our consumer version and the detailed analytics in the pro version.”
VoterTide’s consumer-facing product can be found at votertide.com, but the pro version, which touts detailed social media statistics around Twitter mentions, Facebook shares, YouTube plays, for example, will cost anywhere from $500 – $1,000 per month. The higher subscription costs will give political professionals, such as campaign managers, access to not only their candidates data but the data of every competitor in their race. (VoterTide Pro users can save a list of candidates to their profiles to keep tabs on their activity. Screenshot courtesy of VoterTide.)
VoterTide Pro provides Twitter analytics, such a number of mentions per day and most used phrases. Screenshot courtesy of VoterTide.
As of today, VoterTide has collected at between 3-6 months of data for every single house, senate and the presidential race. “We have house and senate (535 seats) and their competitors. Within the next two weeks we’ll have every governor, large city mayor and several non-profit groups.”
On top of all the data collected, VoterTide is crunching an overall candidate scoring algorithm they’re calling the Tide Score, which falls on a 100-point scale – President Obama is currently highest with 87.2 and Texas Governer and republican candidate hopeful Rick Perry is second with 55.1. “VoterTide’s algorithms use [collected] data to assess candidates’ current standings and measure progress over time,” VoterTide’s information page states. “It’s a new kind of polling – one that shows results in real-time, directly from the voice of the public, free of bias.”
Beyond the VoterTide consumer-face homepage, users can drill down for free to see what articles or videos are mentioning a politician. Screenshot from votertide.com.
Since our first story, VoterTide has added three employees: Marq Manner and Nick Carl as social strategists and sales and Matt Barr as a developer. “[Matt] is far smarter than me and has really helped us take our analytics to the next level,” Winter said. Also, Winter gave more details of Whitten’s involvement, disclosing that he’s both invested in and came on as a partner and chairman of the board.
Looking ahead, Winter said: “We have a lot of cool things in development. What we’re launching is the first step in our overall vision. We have much much more to offer on the free ‘political junkie’ side and we can’t wait to roll out in the next few months.”
