The whirlwind that is the ‘car crash’ demise of US actor Sheen is everywhere; tv, print headlines, twitter, facebook and bar conversations on both sides of the pond. His inevitable deterioration is captivating the public’s thirst for gossip but in the greater scheme of things where does he sit? There’s plenty going on in the world at the moment; political unrest in North Africa and the much anticipated launch of Apple’s iPad 2 for example, not that you can in any way compare the two but their contrast makes them even more interesting to compare. So what if you were to look at the popularity online of the celebrity breakdown vs. the political dictator vs. the latest technology launch from Apple, who would win?

UK sentiment analysis firm, Brandwatch, have done just that in their latest Friday Fix to look at who, when pitched against each other, has the most value in social media. Stats measured from this weeks launch of the iPad 2. Let battle commence…

As shown in the graph above the iPad trounces both Gaddafi and Sheen to take first place in the volume of mentions and in Brandwatch’s own words it seems that ‘everyone’s up for a revolution or a bit of celeb bashing.. UNTIL a great new piece of tech comes out.’

Secondly, Brandwatch set out to test the true popularity of the three. For the purposes of the experiment neutral sentiment was filtered to show just positive vs negative. Let battle commence…

As illustrated above, whilst there are understandably negative and positive comments for all three as would be expected (although in my Apple obsessed opinion I find it hard to believe that they can do any wrong – should I be expecting the iPad 2 in the post Mr Jobs?) the Sheen-meister leads the way somewhat surprisingly overthrowing the despicable actions of a dictator to evoke the most negative comments online…hmmm.

Overall popularity – Apple 1; celebrity and dictator 0 Most hated – celebrity Sheen rules; dictator and technology overthrown.

Worrying findings in a media & technology obsessed world or, less sensitive topics allowing for easier and more related comments?

Facebook has published a Gross National Happiness Index where you can track levels of happiness across different countries. Users rate their happiness as positive or negative. I found this at least interesting but of doubtful methodology although 400 million of Facebook users is a fair sample.

Gross National Happiness is the difference between the positivity and negativity scores.The model is taking into consideration the words used in users’ status updates breaking them out by positive or negative words, for later assess that the day as a whole is counted as happier than usual.

Additionally, the model has been calibrated differently to ensure consistency for different countries which eliminates effects due to differences in the countries’ population and language use.Computers do the calculations.

The graph below shows a positive and negative word use in status updates which covaries with self-reported satisfaction with life. Also note that the graph shows peaks and valleys on days that are culturally and emotionally significant.

Some interesting insights, Argentina has a peak for the International Woman’s day and Puerto Rico is on the contrary a country with large negative fluctuations. For the UK, anything surprising as Christmas is still the happiest day.

It would have been great to have had Greece in the list of countries.

Now we only need to understand if there’s any correlation between this graph and shopping patterns. A good source of insights during the next Football World Cup or another important sports events.

Maybe Facebook will bring in the immediate future models allowing partners to check automated brand engagement (done by computers) and how happy consumers are with a particular brand or service based on people’s status updates.