In election days gone by, the media was the self-appointed spokesman for the common man. That meant that ‘the people’s voice’ was largely that of the editor. Consider if you will the ‘phone hacking scandal’ in the UK which has spawned the ongoing Leveson Inquiry that unearthed many uncomfortable facts. Or how media moguls have benefited from giving their support, on behalf of their readers, to political parties.

The power of the media to shape public opinion has changed with social networks giving our individual voices the opportunity to be heard at as loud a volume as the international publishing house. So I was interested to see Salesforce this week debut their Heroku-platformed app leveraging their social media monitoring and engagement tool, Radian6. A real-time social overview of the London Mayoral Elections, it’s tracking conversational trends and traffic per candidate.

The fact that the incumbent Mayor, Boris Johnson, does not register on the ‘most mentioned Twitter handles’ list piqued my interest. I took a look and was surprised that, considering the election is this Thursday, it had been 9 full days since the last Mayoral tweet. Compared with the ‘most mentioned’ candidate (and former London Mayor) Ken Livingstone’s account, which had, at the time of writing, tweeted well over a dozen times in the last day.

One thing missing from the Salesforce analysis, in my opinion, is tracking the social sentiment of voters; an analysis of the like Radian6 was born for. There are probably several reasons why. It is after all a local election with a limited reach/sample size and the British, more than other nationalities, are more likely to keep their voting to themselves.

But consider the scope of social media influence in the upcoming US Presidential Elections in November this year. How much will social media tell us, if we take the time to listen to the enormous population of socially-enabled Americans? A nation that is traditionally far less reserved when it comes to voicing political leanings.

The mind boggles.....could this be the year we could accurately predict the outcome of an election from a Twitter trend? The year that individual voices shape the political agenda rather than the media? What will the hot topics be and who will emerge as key influencers?

And with the ability to measure social sentiment on a grand scale, could Tweeter-power even affect political policy? One this is sure: this is going to be fascinating to monitor!