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?

Congress is at a stalemate over raising the federal debt ceiling. President Barack Obama addressed the nation Monday night and encouraged Americans to pressure their elected representatives to work out a compromise that will avoid a potentially devastating default.

Obama sought to increase pressure for congressional leaders to reach a deal that would allow the government to continue borrowing money to pay its debts after August 2.

“The American people may have voted for divided government, but they didn’t vote for a dysfunctional government,” Obama said. “So I’m asking you all to make your voice heard. If you want a balanced approach to reducing the deficit, let your member of Congress know. If you believe we can solve this problem through compromise, send that message.”

We used Social Radar to analyze conversations on blogs and social media outlets.

‘Compromise’ mentions

The word ‘compromise’ was mentioned 410% more often than average online immediately following President Obama’s speech.

‘Compromise’ conversation topics

Nearly every topic of conversation around the word ‘compromise’ is currently related to the debt ceiling discussion. The word ‘Republicans’ appears in 16% of compromise conversations and is 70% negative.

Content distribution

Nearly 70% of ‘compromise’ conversations came via microblogs such as Twitter, while 17% came via blogs.

The Democratic-led Senate and Republican-led House are barreling toward a showdown on competing plans to cut spending and raise the debt limit as a resolution to the intensifying crisis just one week before a possible federal default. Obama referred to the Republicans’ plan as ‘cuts-only’ and the Democrats’ plan as a ‘balanced approached.’ We measured sentiment online around Democrats and Republicans.

Democrat sentiment

Conversations around Democrats are currently 54% negative.

Republican sentiment

Conversations around Republicans are currently 60% negative.

The two sides seem farther apart than ever. Monday’s day of legislative chess moves, back-to-back party caucuses and closed-door meetings ended with a nationally televised Presidential address and a rebuttal by the House speaker, John Boehner. We measured sentiment around President Obama compared to John Boehner.

President Obama sentiment

Conversations around President Obama are currently 55% negative.

Boehner sentiment

Conversations around John Boehner are currently 68% negative.

Based on initial conversations online around Democrats, Republicans, Obama and Boehner, it appears that the public is siding in favor of the Democrats’ plan for a balanced compromise approach.

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.