As a former cabinet minister in New Brunswick, Craig Leonard knows how quickly and decisively public opinion develops on social media. It helps him as the CEO of Eyesover, a new Fredericton-based social media monitoring company.

Eyesover is the brainchild of Ali Ghorbani, the dean of the computer science faculty at University of New Brunswick. Over the last decade, he has developed software that can not only analyze sentiment on social media but detect the direction that the public discussion is heading.

To launch the company, he teamed up with Leonard, who had served as a Fredericton-area member of the legislature and minister of energy from 2010 to 2014.

Spending time in politics taught Leonard a lot about the value of what people say on social media.

“What it showed me was the online community is really where things take place these days,” Leonard said in a phone interview on Monday. “We often use the term that a Facebook group is the new church basement. It’s where the discussions really take place. What I recognized is that to not listen to that discussion, it really would undercut the policy you’re trying to put forward. And if there are problems forming, you obviously can take steps to mitigate those.”

Ghorbani — who is also a co-founder of the Fredericton cybersecurity company Sentrant Security — set out to create a social media monitoring system that could identify the trends the user was not even aware of. Leonard said there are lots of systems that can highlight public sentiments about a project or policy.

Eyesover analyzes the data on social media to detect how the public is interpreting an issue regardless of what the user is looking for.

“It looks at the data in the areas you’re not looking for and picks out the issues that are now being discussed related to your sector or industry,” said Leonard. “We capture the things that aren’t on your radar yet.”

The team, which includes Abtin Zohrabi as head of research and Jesse English as head of system development, financed the development of the system through an industrial research assistance program grant. On April 1 of this year, they began selling the product and found a strong appetite for the product among large corporations, municipalities and even political parties.

Leonard declined to state the number or names of the clients, but he said they include some of the largest companies in Canada, including some with international operations. He added that he has already met his sales targets for 2016 with an entire quarter left in the year.

Leonard plans to continue selling the product through one-on-one sales meetings, and the product development in the coming months will focus on enhancing ease of use. Users now need the assistance of the Eyesover team to set it up and use all the proper key words. Leonard said the near-term goal is to launch a version that allows users to do these things on their own, that that should improve the scalability of the product.

“The company has been funded so far by the founders themselves, but we are working on a share offering,” he said. “We’re going to keep the target low, about $250,000, but if the demand is there we would be willing to go as high as $500,000.”