Pareto [mediaczar]

Posts Tagged ‘pareto’

Pareto Novelli — Some Q&As

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

A recent post about some Pareto analysis of the Porter Novelli Twitter sample , “Porter Novelli Twitter folk – the 80/20 rule”, stirred up a little bit of interest on Twitter — and made me think again about what I’m doing and why. Partly because those conversations were off-blog (and I’d like to capture the answers I gave somewhere more permanent) and partly because I’ve now had time to think of better answers I thought I’d set them down here.

First, a little background. This Q&A is the sixth post in an impromptu series about the Twitter people where I work (Porter Novelli, the international public relations agency.) By now you might think that I’d be tired of this stuff, but you’d have another think coming. Here’s a quick list to bring you up to date.

Looking at this, you might also think I clearly had nothing better to do than analyze Porter Novelli people and their Twittering ways. In fact, as an experimental data set, I couldn’t really ask for anything much better. It’s sufficiently large (more than 200 people), international (I’ve counted more than 10 countries — and I’m sure there are more), and I have some real-world access to all of the people in the sample, which means I can compare my findings with some hard data.

That said, the experiment is more about learning about how we can analyze Twitter networks — about discovering how representative they are as a word-of-mouth (WOM) channel for example, and what they can tell us about other kinds of social network, or about finding new ways to analyze such data sets — than it is about answering any specific questions. So I’ve not got any carefully mapped-out research plan. Instead I follow paths that strike me as interesting, or possible, or that are suggested to me by friends and readers.