In my screencasts for Radian6 the example I used was the current Presidential election. I created a basic topic profile to monitor all 'conversation' involving the four major candidates at that time, McCain, Romney, Clinton and Obama.

It's been interesting to watch the level of conversation related to select topics within the profile. Here are two trend graphs looking at the past 30 days. Looking at the first, guess when Romney dropped out :-)

Looking at the second, it's interesting to see how conversation involving states with primaries rises and falls in somewhat perfect time. At the far left, we were just coming off of the South Carolina and then Florida primaries. It's interesting to see the dip for Texas and Ohio come before the primary next week. Perhaps people are tired of talking about it :-)