Last night’s debate saw the reputation of Gordon Brown rise significantly, while David Cameron remained static, according to analysis by social media specialist Yomego.

Yomego has been analysing the reputations of each leader through the first two leaders debates, and the reputational shifts are charted in the graph below, as are the social media reputation scores of each leader.

Yomego’s Social Media Reputation audit analysed discussions from 12,000 online sources to attribute a Social Media Reputation score to each leader. The system creates an index that scores (out of 100) the popularity of a brand or person on social media, compared to its competitors.

The index takes into account: volume of ‘noise’ on social media (those 142, 795 tweets from last night); how recently the brand or person has been discussed; the tone of social media coverage; and how recently the brand or person generated positive sentiment. It then applies human analysis to put these scores in context, and identify what the main issues are behind each score.

David Cameron – The Conservative performance from last night has been rather overshadowed by the attempts of several newspapers (but let’s face it the Daily Mail was leading the pack) to smear the Lib Dems. However, on social media this failed to work: the satirical hashtag #nickcleggsfault is still trending massively on Twitter.

Cameron still faces the problem of not getting his message across in the right way, and as the trend on this graph shows, his reputation is suffering as a result.

Nick Clegg is still ahead of his rivals on social media reputation. He appears to have real grass roots support in social media (there are a surprising number of Lib Dem supporters out there blogging), in a similar way to Barack Obama ahead of the Presidential election (not that Clegg is any Obama).

What’s interesting is that while the big media newspaper guns are ranged against him there is a genuine social media ground swell getting behind Clegg and Yomego says this is having a knock on influence on both the volume of noise and the positive sentiment around him.

Gordon Brown – It has been pretty clear today looking at Twitter and Facebook that Gordon Brown got a lift in his social media rep after last night’s debate. His policy of substance over style is starting to have an effect on social media users, particularly when compared in social media discussions to David Cameron.

His line “If it’s all about style and PR, count me out. But if you want someone to make decisions, and with the judgment and a plan for the future, I’m your man”, became one of the pull out quotes of the night.

However, Brown and the Labour party don’t appear to have the same kind of grass roots creativity and support that is shown by the Lib Dems’ reputation online.