Yesterday, PR Week published the first in a series of online sentiment trackers, developed by Octopus for client Meltwater - using their very cool Meltwater Buzz service.

This general election, YouGov, ICM and ComRes have been joined by ITV, The Sun, Sky and others - all hoping to predict the outcome of what could be the most closely run election in a generation.  The night of the first Leaders Debate on ITV, my Tweetdeck was not the only one where the #leadersdebate hashtag was largely irrelevant; every tweet in my feed was about the discussion.  And the day afterwards it felt like twitter had spent the night on the psychologist's couch revealing its deepest feelings.  Everyone had some analysis to add.

But where the pollsters seem to have struggled is in garnering a round-the-clock picture of the wider online sentiment towards the parties.  The Meltwater team didn't just want to see how often each party was being talked about, and didn't want to confine the insights to twitter (yeah its big, but political ideology struggles to fit into 140 characters).

Our Meltwater Buzz tracker (now adopted by PR Week to become the PR Week General Election Online Sentiment Tracker) provides an up-to-the-minute report on all social media sentiment for each of the three main parties.

Neck-and-neck into the last fortnight, it should be a great one to watch.

Emily