On the 15th April 2010 a UK first happened where we saw the 3 main political party leaders engage in a live TV debate - much like US guys have been doing for many years.

While the debate had 70 or so ‘rules’ that the leaders had to abide by it has to be said that the debate lived up to it’s billing drawing in a huge audience of nearly 10million people doubling the size of the usual ITV audience.

So, if nearly 10million people watched the debate what did they think?

We used Social Radar to find out.

First stop was to look at the volume of conversations, be they on Twitter, blogs, forums, etc that each of the leaders and parties attracted over the coming days.

It is very evident from the above chart that the dominance of Nick Clegg and his approach to the debate has catalysed online conversation around him as the leader of the Liberal Democrats and also his party. Surprisingly David Cameron managed to gain more conversation online than Gordon Brown but as always was this conversation of a positive or negative persuasion?

As we can see from the above chart the online conversation volume around David Cameron, whilst being larger in volume than the other two leaders, was almost 20% more negative towards him and the Conservative party proving that in this scenario more is definitely not better. Amazingly Nick Clegg steals a sentiment score of or around 75% positive which, to his credit, seemed quite deserved from the way in which he came across on the night.

We then took a look so see what the major topics were that people were aligning with the Leaders Debate over the following 48hrs.

We cross tabbed the most popular terms / words being used in the discussions with sentiment to achieve a holistic view on how the debate was received in general but also to see what the most discussed themes were and whether these were agreeable with the audience or not.

The Leaders Debate was received very well indeed across Twitter as a general theme. Nick Clegg, as we know, was received very positively and was discussed frequently. However, David Cameron as the most discussed topic, second only to the actual debate itself, was simply received well. Diving deeper into this area we were able to see that the online public just did not understand the position he took on the night, didn’t like the way in which he seemed to be ‘buddying up’ with Nick Clegg (Hung Parliment springs to mind!) and overall his Angry Dad persona was just not liked.

Food critics, mom’s, physicians and personal trainers are cringing at the thought of this new ’sandwich’ Kentucky Fried Chicken is positioning to consumers. The Double Down is a one-of-a-kind sandwich that features two thick and juicy boneless white meat chicken filets (Original Recipe® or Grilled), two pieces of bacon, two melted slices of Monterey Jack and pepper jack cheese and Colonel’s Sauce. So meaty, there is no room for a bun.

While we’re all aware of bacon’ new found popularity, and the purported ability of free will,  this new KFC menu item has got peoples’ stomachs turning.

Since the news spread, a heavy influx of conversations have sprouted up all around the interwebs. Most topics maintained high relations to the sandwich itself, but as some time passed, much of the chatter looked to target & revolve around the KFC brand specifically.

Overall sentiment shows a fairly level playing field with both negative and positive remarks claiming about half of the references. This is interesting as most people are basing these decisions entirely without ever having sampled the new treat.

Here’s a word cloud showing more popular terms associated with related posts. From this we can tell that people like the fact that the new sandwich includes bacon and that a heart attack as a direct result of eating this sandwich is not so bad.

Over the past week, Double Down has appeared as a trending topic on Twitter. This being said, it’s no surprise that it reported the highest amount of related activity. And, as more talk about the sandwich continue to engulf the internet, food bloggers & critics everywhere will have no choice but to succumb reader demands and scarf one of these babies down (then write about it). So, I’m sure we can expect to see blog coverage increase.

In the mean time, its rounding in on that lunch hour. What to eat, what to eat….