Last week the Prime Minister set out his vision for the “big society”, the flagship social policy of the Conservative-LibDem coalition government. The initiative aims to take the emphasis of responsibility away from the government and instead empower people to run local services such as schools, post offices and transport networks.
The idea of the big society is something David Cameron has spoken about for some time, first presenting it in his campaign to become leader of the Tory party back in 2005. However, it was only in the last week that online interest in the idea peaked, after the Prime Minister officially launched the campaign.

As the chart below illustrates, between the week ending 17 July 2010 and the week ending 24 July 2010, searches for ‘big society’ increased eight-fold. During the same period searches for ‘the big society’ tripled.

As with all political ideas there has been a mixed online response to Mr Cameron’s big society, ranging from wholehearted support to claims that the concept is a cover for public spending cuts. What should be heartening for the Conservatives is that, of the 593 search terms related to the big society searched for in the past 12 weeks, none of the top 50 were negative.

The search terms used to look for information about the big society are indicative of search behaviour driven by curiosity rather than either support or disapproval. Search terms such as ‘what is big society’ were prominent, and it wasn’t until the 51st most popular search term that a disparaging phrase turned up. This is a family blog so I won’t reprint the phrase, but I can reveal that one of the words is often used in the phrase: “the dogs…”

The Conservatives benefited from the volume of searches for ‘big society’, with the microsite thebigsociety.co.uk picking up 17% of all search traffic from the term and the party’s homepage receiving 12%. The Guardian also capitalised on interest for the story with three of its properties appearing in the top 10. As people online shared their thoughts and ideas about the big society idea through social media, it was no big surprise to see that Facebook and Twitter also made the top 10 downstream websites list.