Last week, the U.S. House passed very new, very controversial bill over health-care. This new legislation transforms rules governing the medical industry to ensure that tens of millions of uninsured Americans get medical coverage. While the topic is blatant big talk on television and in the papers, it’s still hard to get a grasp on how ‘we the people’ are actually reacting to this historical milestone. To gain better insight as to how the public actually feels, we look turn to the trusty internet & social media to provide us with some answers.

First, lets look at overall buzz. Below we see that there were over 30,000 posts in the days around the date the reform was signed into law. Obviously, people were very opinionated on the topic and felt the need to say so on the internet. Next, lets look at content.

This word cloud shows the most frequent terms associated with the posts, and are then classified by sentiment. Green depicts phrases with highly positive sentiment, red shows negative references, and grey lists neutral ones. As usual with government battles, the Democrats and Republicans find themselves in a battle.

Peeping into overall user sentiment, Social Radar tells us that a hefty 59% of posts directly related to the health-care reform were positive.

Here we see the most popular words associated with each emotion, along with the percentage of posts the terms appeared. We are able to dissect and determine the underlying issues that the public is conveying on the social web (Turns out that a lot of it has to do with the country’s deficit).

So the million dollar question that I’m sure everyone knows the answer to. Where are these conversations happening?

And you guessed it. Twitter was the favorite platform, with blogs falling into 2nd place. What do you think about all this? Feel free to leave a comment.

We were alerted by Social Radar that chatter volumes around Nestle and Kit-Kat specifically were rising by the minute. When we checked-in we found that the topic of the moment was Palm Oil.

We took a look at the actual chatter volumes for the Nestle company and we were staggered to see the trend below.

It was clear to us that something was going on here so we dug deeper.

Our conclusions were that Greenpeace had staged a video on Vimeo which you can find here and they had also changed their homepage to mimic the logo of the much- loved Kit-Kat chocolate bar.

The discussion had flowed out primarily across Nestles Facebook page and a Nestle employee was deleting Wall Posts at a serious rate.

We then took a look to see how this was effecting the sentiment towards the Kit Kat product and discovered that over the past couple of days the positive sentiment to a much-loved product has been rapidly falling through the floor as they are being associated with destroying rain forests for the plam oil used to create them and also being accused of potentially killing Orang-utans by virtue of this.

Whether true or not we are clearly seeing a hugely negative trend shift for not just Kit-Kat the product but Nestle as a house of brands.

The key here is to identify the influencial persons, engage with them and try to stop the rot from penetrating further into their business by being open and honest and using the social channels to drive back the potentially incorrect debate – that is if it is incorrect of course.

Earlier this year, Toyota announced a series of recalls for many of their most popular models. The uproar in media has definitely impacted Toyota sales, not to mention their overall reputation as America’s top selling auto brand. So what did Toyota do to manage this crisis? They took to the world of social media. Now to answer the question that everyone is dying to know: is it working?

Here we see the rise in social media activity from the end of 2009 to present day. The number of raw posts has quadrupled, hitting a high point of nearly 120,000 posts in a single day. Today’s biggest related news: The Run Away Prius.

Looking at sentiment, to the left we see an analysis of how people felt about Toyota pre-incident. To the right, you can see the influx of negativity as it increases about 30%. And it doesn’t seem to be calming down one little bit.

Above is an illustration of sentiment over time. As you can see, the red line (which depicts negativity) has yet to show a distinct decline, meaning that people are still upset and Toyota needs to try harder at resolving these issues. Hmm.. now if only they could figure out where to start…

By looking at this classification of buzz, it looks like they should start with Twitter as it is pulling in the biggest portion of the traffic. Toyota has a big following on Twitter whether they’re direct followers or not. It’s time for Toyota to accelerate and start reaching out one to one.

We all know that Canada triumphed this past Sunday when they beat the US 3-2 for the 2010 Olympic gold medal in hockey (here’s a video to clue you in if you didn’t know). The game itself was very intense and I found myself sitting in an airport refreshing my iphone browser trying to keep track of the game, and I don’t even care about hockey! I was more interested in seeing the impact this North American civil war was imposing  in social media.

Numbers peaked on game day, cumulatively reporting upwards of over 9,000 blog, news and forum posts directly related to this final game.

Microblogging activity like that on Twitter took up nearly 60% of the chatter with numerous hashtags, RTs and banter reproducing over the internet.

It could have been the fact this is the first time in many years that anyone has doubted Canada to win the gold in hockey, but it is surprising that even with all the drama revolved around this year’s winter Olympics (the luge guy dying, the ice skater’s mother passing, etc), that hockey (as a gaming division) prevailed more talked about than any of the other categories.

Its interesting to see what sparks peoples’ wires and the issues / stories that push us to post on the internet. From the past weekend’s events, I can predict that hockey will eventually tower over football. Hey, you never know, right?