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Sunday, January 25th, 2009
Yesterday I did a little work with the TwitterCounter API. Today I’ve gone a little further and (purely as an experiment) ranked a list of Twitter people in Porter Novelli by the number of their followers.
What happens if we chart this? Here’s a kind of Pareto chart showing users ranked in order of followers and the total reach that we get at each stage.
If you’ve seen this kind of thing before, it looks wrong, doesn’t it? That red curve should be steeper at the beginning and have longer flatter asymptote. If you’ve ever heard of the 80/20 rule this is one of the graphs that describes it. Normally the head of the graph (the first 20% of the x-axis) controls around 80% of the value while the tail (the remaining 80% of the x-axis) controls around 20% of the value. If you’ve ever heard about the long tail, it’s this tail that Chris Anderson et al. are talking about.
What’s wrong with the data?
It’s not so much the data as what I’ve not done with it. There must be many, many duplicated connections here. So now I need to write something that will go through the followers of all the Porter Novelli Twitter usernames in ranked order, and only count unique (or unduplicated) followers.
I’m hoping that when I re-do the chart, it will look something more like this:
Posted in porter novelli, twitter | 1 Comment »
Counting Twitter followers
Saturday, January 24th, 2009
TwitterCounter, the service that tells you how many people followed a given Twitter user on a given date (among other things) has an API – so I thought I’d take a look at it to see whether I could create a quick automated table of rankings.
Here’s the simplest way to query the API:
[code]
http://twittercounter.com/api/?username=mediaczar&output=xml
[/code]
Just cut and paste that into the address bar of your browser for example. Fairly simple. Change the username and you’ll get the data for a different user. Here’s what you get back from the API — an XML file with lots of rich meaty data:
(more…)
Tags: google spreadsheets, twitter, twittercounter, xml
Posted in hack, pipes, twitter | 3 Comments »
Review: “In the Beginning… Was the Command Line”
Saturday, January 24th, 2009
Partly due to a comment I left on Amelia Torode’s blog, I’m re-reading Neal Stephenson’s 1999 monograph In the Beginning…Was the Command Line
This particular book concerns itself with the history and nature of operating systems, how they are shaped by and reflect our wider culture, and how (in turn) they shape our society. It makes fascinating reading, but it’s been almost ten years since I last read it and much has changed.
For one thing, the future didn’t work out the way Stephenson (or anyone at the time) expected. Stephenson forecast doom for Apple, for example:
They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly.
But in 1999 when he wrote this, Apple stock was in fact just beginning to recover from its disastrous performance in the mid nineties.
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Tags: apple, books, neal stephenson, operating systems, steve jobs
Posted in review | Comments Off
Dan Zarella’s ReTweet Mapper
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
Dan Zarella’s ReTweet mapper “indexes ReTweet streams into hierarchical structures that can be displayed visually”. I wouldn’t have known about this if it hadn’t been for the Retweetist — a project that tweets out the most retweeted URLs, and the Tweetbacks plugin from Joost de Valk that traps Tweets that mention your blog post. That’s a lot of pinging around the web. As if by magic, the views on the US congress Twitter map post have shot up again, even though it’s almost ten days old.
Really quite flattered to have one of my posts tweeted by Jack Schofield. I rather feel like I’ve arrived.
Tags: dan zarella, jack schofield, joost de valk
Posted in twitter | Comments Off
Introducing the Porter Novelli magic Twitter friend maker (beta)
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
A couple of days ago, I posted a map of all the Porter Novelli people we knew of who are tweeting. The list keeps getting bigger: at today’s count, there are 212 known Twitter people.
At the moment, I manage three Twitter accounts (thanks mostly to the excellent Twhirl Twitter client that lets me log in simultaneously to as many accounts as I like. Two of those accounts are Porter Novelli-related, so it was essential that I follow everyone. Of course, I could simply set up an auto-follow using something like Tweetlater , but that wasn’t going to work if people didn’t know about and follow those accounts in the first place.
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Posted in porter novelli, twitter | 1 Comment »
Map of Porter Novelli people on Twitter on 17th Jan 2008
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009
Marian Salzman (our Global CMO here at Porter Novelli) has had the inspired idea of getting people in the agency to tweet about the most exciting story this week (probably) — the inauguration of Barack Obama
You can see the results of the experiment on her blog.
I’m all for this, of course, for several reasons:
- It gets new people onto Twitter
- It helps us create a stronger network among Porter Novelli twitterers
- It means I can track who at the agency is on Twitter
Tags: Barack Obama, influence, influence mapping, mapping, network analysis, networks, porter novelli, social media, twitter, visualization
Posted in networks, porter novelli, twitter | 6 Comments »
Social media marketing, and why we shouldn’t talk to strangers
Saturday, January 17th, 2009
Public service message: please don’t push strangers in front of oncoming trains (by freshelectrons on Flickr)
When we’re using push channels like display ads, direct marketing or pull channels like websites or search marketing — numbers are what count, and numbers are enough. But when we are talking about social media channels, we shouldn’t target strangers. Instead, we should look at our existing relationships and learn how to make the most of these to our mutual benefit.
I don’t know whether you’ve had the experience of meeting someone famous in an ordinary context (in the street, say, or in a supermarket queue). I have.
It is a profoundly disturbing experience. For a split second your brain tells you that this is someone familiar but not why. Since you’re not expecting to meet David Bowie in your video store, your brain leaps to the most probable conclusion — this is clearly an old acquaintance or a friend-of-a-friend. By the time you realize who it is, you’ve already been staring at them too long, possibly waving and beginning to say hello.
What’s unnerving about this experience of course, is the asymmetry of the relationship; you know who they are (and possibly even some intimate details of their private lives) but they have no idea who you are. For all that you think you know them, you are in fact complete bloody strangers.
The circle of complete bloody strangers
At Porter Novelli, we’ve been trying out a new way of helping people think about the targets for our social media activities. Targeting in social media is one of the many places where conventional marketing experience fails to help; and indeed, generally hinders. For want of a better name, I’m calling it the “circle of complete bloody strangers.”
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Tags: Add new tag, douglas rushkoff, influence, marketing, social currency, social media
Posted in influence, opinion | 10 Comments »
Network map of US Congress twitterers
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009
This is a map of the current US congressmen and women who are currently on Twitter (you can click it to see a bigger map where you can read the names.) The direction of the arrows show who follows whom, and the size of the blobs indicates how “popular” a given congressperson is among their twittering peers (where “popular” means something like “is followed by many of their peers.”) Colours indicate party affiliation (for those of you who — like me — don’t live in the ‘States and who — like me — need reminding from time to time, the Democrats are the blue dots.)
Network of US Congress twitterers showing citation frequency. Click for bigger.
A cursory glance at this map shows a few things:
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Tags: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Culberson, mapping, Neil Abercrombie, network analysis, networks, twitter, united states congress, visualization
Posted in networks, twitter | 49 Comments »
Why doesn’t the Tory MP have Twitter friends?
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009
This is a map of the eight Westminster MPs who are currently on Twitter, and the relationships between them. The larger the blob, the more followers they have among their peers. Apparently they’re a fairly clubbable lot, all – that is – except for Grant Shapps who (it seems) currently has no MP friends on Twitter. I’d say that it’s early days yet, but Mr Shapps appears to have been broadcasting since March 9th 2008. That’s an age in Twitter years. In that period, he has replied to 5 people out of a total of 249 tweets. Lots of people have tried to reach him.
I think that it’s nice that he’s so busy (after all, he has a constituency to run and a government to topple) but do think that if he’s going to do this, he ought to pay a little more attention.
Who (other than each other) are MPs most likely to follow? If we wanted to get a story in front of their noses, who would we most want to talk to? Here’s the list. Tweetminster is like Tweetcongress but with more tea and scones and fewer public representatives. The ubiquitous Stephen Fry is in place, of course. It wouldn’t be Twitter without him.
Tags: Andy Reed, David Lammy, Grant Shapps, Jo Swinson, Kerry McCarthy, Lynne Featherstone, mapping, mp, network analysis, networks, Tom Harris, Tom Watson, twitter, visualization
Posted in networks, twitter | 16 Comments »
