At Engage, we (heart) data. We think that Big Data harnessed from the social web can oftentimes better tell us what’s happening in real time than a traditional opinion poll. There’s no better test of this than the Republican presidential primary, which seems to yield a new frontrunner every week. Wouldn’t it be great to tell in real time, that day, who’s up and who’s down, based on the world’s biggest platforms for real-time conversation?

Last week, Facebook announced the release of its “People Talking About” metric. For any Facebook page or topic, Facebook will tell you how many people are talking about that topic across the entire site — and that’s regardless of whether these people like the given page. In your news feed, you may have seen stories aggregating your friends’ conversation around hot topics like Steve Jobs or the Occupy Wall Street protests.

The results for the Republican candidates for President are revealing, and we plan to track them in this public Google Spreadsheet every day through the primaries. We’ll periodically post our analysis of what the numbers mean to Twitter and Facebook.

Right now, Herman Cain far and away leads the field in Facebook buzz, with nearly 80,000 people talking about him daily. He’s followed by Mitt Romney, who’s also been on the rise — especially with his endorsement by Chris Christie.

A quick note: Any measure of Internet buzz — be it tweets, Facebook posts, or searches — will reward the most controversial and talked about public figures, and these aren’t always the highest vote getters. That’s probably why Cain, with his 9-9-9 plan and his recent surge in the polls, leads, and why Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul place strongly. We think that the best way to draw useful conclusions from this is to look at trends as well as the absolute numbers — and these trends will become more evident over time. If Cain were to fall below his previous performance while other candidates gained, that would be a sign of trouble. Former frontrunner Rick Perry languishing at around one seventh of Herman Cain’s current buzz is already not a great sign for his campaign.

And Facebook buzz surrounding the entire field of candidates seems to be slowly but surely picking up, but it has a ways to go before it rivals the guy they’re going after: Barack Obama, with a total of 443,882 Facebook users talking about him currently, combined with 199,034 for the Republican field in total.