Archive for the ‘twitter’ Category
« Older Entries Newer Entries »Porter Novelli Twitter folk ranked by number of followers
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:
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Tags: google spreadsheets, twitter, twittercounter, xml
Posted in hack, pipes, twitter | 3 Comments »
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 »
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 »
Kerry’s map of the top 50 twittering journalists
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009
My colleague, Kerry Gaffney, has just posted her analysis of the network formed by the top 50 UK journalists on Twitter.
She says:
Looking at the original map, it immediately seems obvious that the PR bunnies of the world are far more likely to link to each other, but just to make sure we dropped both datasets through UCInet and looked at the density scores, and sure enough the PR network is almost twice as dense, sharing 1459 ties compared to 785 for journalists. Or a ratio of .595 against .320 for following within the group, so not quite double, but not very far off.
If you’re interested in this sort of thing (and who, these days, is not?) then I recommend that you take a look at Kerry’s analysis.
Tags: journalists, kerry gaffney, mapping, maps
Posted in networks, twitter | 1 Comment »
Some Twitter Social Network Analysis
Wednesday, December 17th, 2008
On November 10th, Stephen Davies collected together a list of “UK PR people on Twitter” According to PostRank, this (and his earlier post, “UK Journalists on Twitter“) are the most popular posts on his blog.
Then a couple of days later, Stephen Waddington pushed that list through TwitterGrader to come up with his list of “Top 50 UK PR people by Twitter influence“
A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for a seed list with which I could test our “whitelist” and “canonify exception” rules on Rufus (the network analysis tool that Porter Novelli has been working on for the past six months.) This isn’t the right place to go into it, but to put it simply, the whitelist restricts the search to domains that are on the list (like a guest list), and the canonify exception list stops Rufus from chopping the subdomains or directories off the list (without this, a site like sethgodin.typepad.com would just show up as typepad.com or en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_analysis would show up as wikipedia.org. Rufus, by the way, is named after the George Carlin character in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
My colleague, Tim Hoang used to work with Stephen W., so he sent him the image. Wadds then posted “the map on his blog“. My flickr page has never had so much activity.
Here’s the original graph:
Lots of people started drawing conclusions about the nature of PR, or the nature of Twitter from the graphs. There was lots of interesting speculation. Some people thought that this demonstrated how introverted the twitter crowd is. Others thought that it showed how introverted the PR/Social media crowd is. Others seemed to think that it didn’t matter.
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Tags: citation analysis, graph, influence, influence mapping, network analysis, networks, research, social media, twitter
Posted in influence, networks, twitter | 29 Comments »
