Last month we asked, “Can three weeks of increased chatter and negative sentiment across social channels completely derail a Presidential campaign?” Now, we have our answer.

Many of us saw the writing on the wall the week sexual harassment charges against Herman Cain emerged in late October. It was really only a matter of time, especially as additional accusers went public. In fact, a recent Business Insider article cited the Herman Cain downfall as one of the top five PR blunders in 2011, right up there with the Netflix pricing issue, Anthony Weiner and Penn State scandals. As the first serious Republican candidate to pull out of the race – and a former frontrunner at that – we thought we’d take a look at the arc of social conversation and news coverage around Cain’s campaign.

First of all, a basic analysis of volume over the last two months using Meltwater Buzz shows that after the sexual harassment accuser went public, Cain experienced a more than a 200 percent increase in chatter across social channels, from 9,100 mentions on October 30 to 28,310 on October 31, remaining high throughout the weeks ahead with the exception of the Thanksgiving (US) week, when people may have been busy and things were quieting down. But anticipation about Cain suspending his campaign sent his numbers to record heights, with almost 200,000 mentions during the first week of December, compared to roughly 72,000 for new frontrunner, Newt Gingrich. Cain even beat Obama that week, who had about 124,000 election-related mentions. That’s pretty remarkable.

To get a real sense of how Cain dominated the social landscape, compare the volume of Cain chatter versus Gingrich, and you can see that while conversation around Gingrich has been steadily rising, it overall pales in comparison to Cain conversation.

So everyone was talking about Cain. Was it all about the scandal? Take a look at this word cloud from our Meltwater Election Buzz site from November 7, which shows the hottest topics from the day:

And in previous weeks while Cain re-assessed his prospects, the word cloud from November 30 shows people were talking about that as well:

Analysis of sentiment showed an increase in negative conversation since the day the news broke. Prior to the scandal, roughly 20 percent of social chatter around Cain was negative, while since the news broke, 30 percent has been considered negative, spread fairly proportionately across the last six weeks. For perspective, compare this to the same time period for Obama (13 percent negative), Perry (11 percent) and Gingrich (15 percent).

 

Looking at the volume of news stories (not social) in the media about Cain using Meltwater News, the peaks and valleys followed a similar pattern when juxtaposed with the social conversation. Namely, there was a lot of attention in the two weeks after the scandal broke, and then things calmed down a bit until the days leading to his withdrawal from the race.

 

And comparing Cain’s coverage to Gingrich’s shows that again Cain was the more popular topic even for the news media.

 

We knew going into this that many of the seven main Republican candidates we chose to track would eventually fall out of the race. But we had no idea that Cain, a frontrunner, would fall so early and so quickly. It will be interesting to see where the conversation goes now that this hot issue is behind us. Will it be based around issues or will more controversy emerge???