Mapping the South African Political Twittersphere

Mapping Twitter CommunitiesKyle Findlay (TNS)Paul Oosterveld (TNS)Timothy Wilson (Independent)Presented at the MRS Maximizing the Value of Big Data conference, London, January 2013My understanding of big dataLots of data(often unstructured)Resource-intensive to collectResource-intensive to processMeta view of old, familiar systemsthrough primary research???A new world of insights, techniques, understandingThe toolsText analysisMachine learning and artificial intelligenceIntegration of multiple data sourcesEtc . etc. etc.Next-gen databases

What we are really doing here thoughis mapping complex systemsThis?http://vimeo.com/2543720Whats the similarity between

Whats the similarity betweenhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YadP3w7vkJA

And this?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2guKJfvq4uIWhats the similarity between

And this?

Networks?Why am I telling you all this?Lets look at some of our primary researcha case study

We mapped the South African Political TwittersphereRelevance?Who are the popular and/or influential individuals in my network?Who is influencing whom within a specific topic of interest to me?What is the nature of their influence i.e. how are they influencing people?What sub-communities exist within my online community?What topics are people talking about?What are people saying about my brand, political party, charity, music, etc.?

What do these sub-communities believe and how do they relate to my brand/ organisation/etc?

Who is sharing my content online?What are the emerging topics and trends?Are they saying mostly positive or negative things?How far is word of my brand or negative publicity being spread?How is my messaging being shared online?A paradigm shiftMarket researchers misunderstand social media research

Source: Barber, Michael, 2011Participants not respondents(CASRO)Private gardens vs. public spacesRepresentative sample what?We collected two types of dataActual tweetsTwitter user dataNumber of tweets collected:@helenzille = 28,500@PresidencyZA = 3,500@SAPresident = 2,900

Time period: Sept 2011 March 2012Tweets data summary2.5 million64,35758,34937,69520,46012,7534,4793Distance = 0Distance