Rick Santorum swept the three Republican presidential contests Tuesday in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado, reshaping the race and raising questions about frontrunner Mitt Romney’s ability to attract broad conservative support. We used Social Radar to analyze conversations around Romney and Santorum online.

Mitt Romney vs. Rick Santorum buzz

Rick Santorum mentions spiked above Mitt Romney mentions online today for the first time since January 6.

Rick Santorum sentiment

Conversations around Rick Santorum have fluctuated between extremely positive and extremely negative throughout the last month. Currently, chatter around Santorum is 56% positive, well above his monthly average.

Mitt Romney sentiment

Sentiment around Mitt Romney has been more steady this month. Conversations mentioning Mitt Romney online are currently 63% positive.

Which candidate is in better position to win the Republican Presidential nominee?

Did former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney stake his claim as the frontrunner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination with a win Tuesday in Florida’s Republican primary?

We used Social Radar to analyze conversations around Republican candidates Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul.

Republican candidate buzz January 2012

While Santorum, Romney and Gingrich each generated the most buzz at different points in January, Romney currently leads the race by a wide margin.

Republican candidate buzz August 2011 – present

When we expand the data analysis to the last six months, we see that Romney outlasted surges by Santorum and Gingrich to remain the frontrunner.

Conversations around Romney are an average of 50% positive, followed by Santorum at 48%, Paul at 47% and Gingrich at 44% positive.

President Obama delivered his third State of the Union address Tuesday night. ”The state of our union is getting stronger,” Obama said, thanks to the economy showing signs of improvement, declining unemployment, rising consumer confidence and reduced levels of household debt.

We used Social Radar to analyze conversations online.

SOTU mentions

The State of the Union (SOTU) was mentioned in nearly 2% of all Internet conversations Tuesday night.

Content distribution

Approximately 85% of Tuesday night’s SOTU conversations came via Twitter; 11% via blogs. ‘Economy’ appears in 20% of conversations and ‘jobs’ appears in 19%.

With the Iowa Caucus results going down to the wire, we turned to Social Radar to analyze conversations around the candidates online.

Iowa Caucus candidate mentions online

Rick Santorum mentions spiked 323% following Tuesday night’s Iowa Caucus, the highest percentage increase of any candidate. Santorum is currently generating more chatter than any other candidate, edging out Ron Paul and Mitt Romney.

Rick Santorum sentiment

Conversations around Santorum online are currently nearly 59% positive.

Ron Paul sentiment

Conversations around Ron Paul are currently 52% positive.

Mitt Romney sentiment

Conversations around Mitt Romney are currently 61% positive.

Did Rick Santorum put himself in position to win the Republican Presidential nomination Tuesday night? Or will Romney’s slight edge in positive sentiment prevail?

Troy Davis, whose case drew international attention, was put to death by lethal injection for the 1989 killing of an off-duty police officer in Savannah, Georgia, prison officials announced Wednesday night. The public expressed disgust and outrage online Thursday – Casey Anthony even became a trending topic as many expressed dismay over Anthony being deemed innocent in the death of her daughter while Davis was executed.

Troy David conversation topic cloud

Rarely do we see a topic in the Social Radar database so overwhelmingly negative.

Content breakdown

This week 93% of Troy Davis mentions came via Twitter. The word ‘Georgia’ appeared in 32% of all Troy Davis posts, and was 90% negative, as many questioned how the justice system in the state of Georgia could execute a person who may have been innocent.

An unusual earthquake startled millions of people from Colorado to New York on Tuesday. Tens of thousands of people were evacuated from office buildings in Washington, D.C. and New York City. According to @Twitter, within a minute of Tuesday’s earthquake, there were more than 40,000 earthquake-related Tweets. People were seeing tweets before they even felt the quake. Another small earthquake shook San Francisco later that night.

Also on Tuesday, triumphant rebel fighters and thousands of ordinary Libyans stormed Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s fortress compound in Tripoli, Libya, carting off mementos of his 42-year dictatorship. The capture of Col. Gadhafi’s complex stands as one of the rebels’ highest moments in their six-month battle to topple the world’s longest-tenured current ruler. The whereabouts of Gadhafi himself were unknown.

We used Social Radar to analyze conversations around both topics.

Earthquake vs. Tripoli, Libya buzz

Both topics were mentioned hundreds of thousands of times on Tuesday, but ‘earthquake’ was mentioned 34% more times than ‘Tripoli’, ‘Libya’, ‘Qaddafi’/'Ghadafi’ combined.

Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann emerged the winner in the widely-anticipated Ames Straw Poll in Iowa on Saturday. The conservative congresswoman came out on top in the event with 4,823 votes. U.S. Rep. Ron Paul came in second place. Here’s a breakdown of the results:

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.): 4,823 votes
U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas): 4,671 votes
Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty: 2,293 votes
Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.): 1,657 votes
Former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain: 1,456 votes
Texas Governor Rick Perry: 718 votes
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney: 567 votes
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich: 385 votes
Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman: 69 votes
U.S. Rep Thad McCotter (R-Mich.): 35 votes

We used Social Radar to analyze conversations around each candidate online and determine.

Social Radar Straw Poll results

Rick Perry is currently generating the most chatter online and has generated the most chatter overall throughout the last month. Ron Paul also slightly edged out Iowa Straw Poll winner Michelle Bachmann.

Do you think social media results are more telling than Iowa Straw Poll results?

Wall Street had its worst day since the 2008 financial crisis, as fearful investors reacted to the United States losing its coveted AAA credit rating. All three major U.S. stock indexes sank between 5% and 7%, pushing the Dow below 11,000 for the first time since last November.

We reported on Friday that Jersey Shore was sadly generating more buzz on line than Obama and debt ceiling agreement. Though Jersey Shore buzz subsided over the weekend, the American public’s focus still does not seem to be on the economic crisis.

Stock market buzz

Neither the Dow nor stock market showed a significant spike in mentions despite today’s plunge resulting from the S&P’s downgrade of the United States’ credit rating by one notch to “AA+” for the first time in history.

As the stock market continues to crash and America is on the verge of default, what’s on your mind? I’m hoping its not Jersey Shore.

Jersey Shore buzz

Sadly, Jersey Shore buzz is at an all time high. MTV premiered Season 4 of Jersey Shore last night, filmed in Italy.

Surely with President Obama’s 50th birthday this week and all of the news surrounding the debt ceiling agreement, Obama generated more buzz than Jersey Shore…right? Wrong.

Obama vs. Jersey Shore

Jersey Shore buzz easily surpassed Obama buzz following the Season 4 premiere last night.

Jersey Shore sentiment

I guess we can at least take solace that the conversations around Jersey Shore last night and today have been primarily negative.

Typically anytime a watershed event happens, my Twitter stream is full of people chiming in with opinions. Amy Winehouse, Grammy Awards, Super Bowl…you can’t really miss a major event and expect to login to Twitter without a spoiler alert. So today when President Obama asked all Americans to “call, email and tweet their GOP lawmakers if you want to see #compromise,” I expected an overload of tweets on the subject. Surprisingly, I saw very few. Then the @BarackObama account proceeded to post the Twitter handles of the GOP lawmakers in each state, so that Twitter users may voice their opinions to the people in charge. Still not much activity in my stream.

In other news, Apple now has more cash than the U.S. Government.

We used Social Radar to analyze which was generating more chatter online.

Apple vs. The U.S. Government

Wow. iPhone and Apple are generating significantly more chatter than Obama and the compromise he asked Americans to tweet about.

Tweet mentions within Obama chatter

Despite the President’s plea and his staff’s diligent work to provide contact info for all 50 states, the word “tweet” only appeared in around 3% of all Obama mentions today.

Will the American public step up and make their voices heard on this important topic?