Archive for the ‘Data’ Category

« Older Entries

Using Social Data to Predict Financial Markets

February 9th, 2012
1 Comment

Seth McGuire, Gnip’s director of assets and financial technology, was on both Fox Business’ After the Bell and Bloomberg’s Money Moves to discuss how social data is being used by hedge funds as another layer of data to analyze the markets. Gnip is currently working with about a dozen hedge funds that have over $1 Billion AUM

Watch Seth on After the Bell

Watch Seth on Money Moves

{Infographic} Top 5 Most Talked About Super Bowl Commercials on Social Media

February 7th, 2012
2 Comments

For a marketer, the Super Bowl is the pinnacle of getting the word out about your company. It’s lovingly referred to as the Brand Bowl by those who prefer to watch commercials over football. While everyone has their favorite ads, the question is what ads generated the most buzz? Tracking data on Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress, we were able to determine what were the top 5 most talked about Super Bowl commercials on social media.

Most Popular Super Bowl Commercials on Social Media

Smart brands helped facilitate the conversation online by including hashtags such as the #solongvampires tag from Audi. In fact, it was the most popular hashtag we tracked related to commercials yesterday and today. The next most popular was #makeitplatinum by Budweiser but it only had approximately half the usage of the vampires hashtag. Having a social media presence that was well known to customers was important in generating buzz too. As a brand, the @Pepsi Twitter handle received the most mentions. The next most at replies went to athlete @deionsanders who was in two Super Bowl commercials.

Deion Sanders wasn’t the only celebrity to make the rounds multiple times. Jay Leno was in a commercial for both his show and the Acura NSX. Adriana Lima, known for selling Victoria Secret underwear, also helped promote Kia and Teleflora. Darth Vader was featured in an ad for Volkswagen and his upcoming return to movie theaters in 3D. The musical group LMFAO was featured in multiple commercials and the half time show. We set up different sets of rules to track which commercials they would be associated with.

For social media, having a well known celebrity helped keep the social media mentions coming. For GI Joe, mentions of The Rock were 10X the mentions of GI Joe. Obviously, for H&M being the #1 talked about commercial was in large part due to David Beckham and he tracked for significantly more coverage than the brand generated. Celebrities give something for people to talk about while brands such as Hyundai had less remarkable components of their ad to comment on in social media. In some cases, the celebrities might not be who you think they are, while Jerry Seinfeld was huge for Acura, the Soup Nazi had nearly as many shout outs as Jerry.

You didn’t have to have a Super Bowl commercial to have a strong social media presence on game day. In fact, while Apple didn’t run a Super Bowl ad, they received enough social media mentions to rank among the top Super Bowl advertisers for the day. This is due to their continually strong brand presence on social media.

Interestingly, while the most popular commercials resonated at similar levels for both Facebook and Twitter  - there was one significant difference. On Twitter, the Acura NSX with Jerry Seinfeld commercial was significantly more popular than the Honda commercial with Ferris Bueller. While on Facebook, they received similar levels of mentions.

Watch the Top 5 Most Popular Commercials:

1. David Beckham for H&M

2. Chrysler Imported From Detroit

3. Audi So Long Vampires

4. Baby Slingshot for Doritos

5. Coca Cola “Catch”

Gnip and Automattic Make Whole New Universe of Data Available

January 17th, 2012
No Comments

“This new data from Automattic is a big addition and a testament to Gnip’s commitment to drive the social data economy forward. This is an important source to add to the social data mix, one that we know our customers will take full advantage of.”

- Rob Begg, VP Marketing of Radian6

As social media data becomes more and more important across a range of businesses, our customers are asking for access to more data sources to give them a more complete picture of the social media conversations that are relevant to their businesses.

Today, we’re excited to announce a major addition to our coverage of the conversations taking place on blogs around the world. We’re expanding our relationship with Automattic to make a whole new universe of blog and comment data available to the market for the first time anywhere.

For those who don’t know, Automattic is a network of web services including WordPress.com, VIP hosting and support, Polldaddy, IntenseDebate, and Jetpack. We’ve been delivering data from WordPress.com and IntenseDebate for about a year and a half and found that while our customers loved their data, they always wanted more.

As of today, we are now offering the full firehose of blog posts and comments from Jetpack-powered WordPress.org sites, as well as engagement streams of “likes” from WordPress.com and IntenseDebate. The new data from WordPress.org greatly increases the coverage available to those who are looking to do deep analysis of blog posts and comments. The new engagement streams enable companies to pull in reaction data to quickly understand sentiment, relevance and resonance. With this they can gauge the intensity of opinion around fast moving blog and comment conversations, helping prioritize critical response.

Being full firehoses, all of the streams from Automattic ensure 100% coverage in realtime giving customers the peace of mind that they can keep up the entire discussion on fast moving threads.

The scope of coverage offered by Automattic is pretty incredible.  Check out some of these stats:

We’re thrilled to be able to offer these new data streams to our customers and can’t wait to see the amazing things they’ll be able to do with them.

Updated: Coverage in GigaOM – Gnip and WordPress deepen ties, expand data partnership

Twitter Shouts: Huntsman’s Out!

January 16th, 2012
No Comments

At Gnip, one of the most fascinating aspects of social media is ‘speed’ – specifically in regards to news stories. We continue to see a trend towards the ‘breaking’ of news stories on platforms like Twitter. Both the speed at which a story is broken as well as the speed at which that story catches on show the incredible power of this medium for information exchange. And as we’ve pointed out before, different social media streams offer different analytical value – Twitter versus a news feed for example.

Last night proved a great example of this as word of Huntsman’s withdrawal from the GOP presidential race crept out. Interestingly, the news was broken by Peter Hamby, a CNN Political Reporter–on Twitter. While CNN followed up on this news a few minutes later, it seems the reporter (or the network) realized the inherent ‘newswire’ value of breaking this news as fast as possible…and used Twitter as part of their strategy to do so!

This Tweet was followed with what we’ve begun to see as the normal ‘Twitter’ spike for breaking news – the chart below, built by our Data Scientist Scott, shows how quickly Huntsman withdrawl was retweeted and passed along. When looked at in comparison to an aggregate news feed (in this case, NewsGator’s Datawire Firehose, which is a content aggregator derived from crowdsourced rss feeds and contains many articles from traditional media providers), some interesting comparisons are brought to light.
Comparing the pulse of Twitter and NewsGator articles breaking Huntsman's withdrawal from the GOP primary race.
Comparing tweets of “huntsman” and news articles breaking Jon Huntsman’s withdrawal from GOP primary race. The blue curves show the “Social Activity Pulse” that characterizes the growth and decay of media activity around this topic. By fitting the rate of articles or tweets to a function we can compare standard measure such as time-to-peak, store half-life etc. (More on this in a future post.) The peak in Twitter is reached about the same time as the first story arrives from NewsGator, over 10 minutes after the story broke on Twitter.

Both streams show a similar curve in story adoption, peak and tail. What’s different is the timeframe of the content. Twitter’s data spikes about 10 minutes earlier than NewsGator’s. NewsGator’s content is more in-depth, as it contains news stories and blog posts, but as we’ve seen in other cases, Twitter is the place where news breaks these days.

 

Tebow Time Scores in Social Media

January 9th, 2012
2 Comments

Wow, what a game!  If you missed the instant classic that was the Broncos/Steelers overtime game tonight, check out the recap.

When Tim Tebow connected with Demaryius Thomas on an 80-yard touchdown pass on the first play of overtime, we saw a noticeable spike in the overall volume of social media messages flowing through the Gnip platform.

Tebow Time!

Spike in Social Media Mentions when Tim Tebow Throws Winning Touchdown against the Steelers

Are Facebook Users More Optimistic than Twitter Users?

January 5th, 2012
1 Comment

New Year’s Eve gives us a sense of closure on the past and an opportunity to make new dreams. With the emergence of social media, we can now see these reflections and resolutions transpire in realtime. As we observed the posts, comments, and tweets related to the New Year, we saw the typical expressions on Facebook and Twitter of best wishes for the coming year and pithy observations about the past year. What we didn’t expect was that users of the two popular social media sites would have different outlooks on the world.

As we enter 2012, Facebook users are more optimistic than Twitter users.

You’re probably wondering how we can say that. Well, we looked at all of the public posts on Facebook and Tweets on Twitter that contained “Happy New Year.” For all of those posts and Tweets, we compared the use of positive words such as “better” and “good” to the use of negative words such as “worse” and “bad.” We found that Tweets with positive words appeared 8 times more frequently than Tweets with negative words. You might be thinking a ratio of 8 to 1 is pretty optimistic…

It may be, but posts on Facebook had a ratio of 40 to 1–such a huge difference lead us to speculate that Facebook is a more optimistic place than Twitter.

Interesting stuff. Could be a variety of reasons for the difference, from the mix of users on each service to the fact that Facebook is used to communicate with friends, while Twitter is user to broadcast to followers. We’ll leave the speculation up to you.

Gnip Cagefight #2: Pumpkin Pie vs. Pecan Pie

November 22nd, 2011
No Comments

Thanksgiving is a time for family gatherings, turkey with all the delicious fixings, football, and let’s not forget, pie! If your family is anything like mine, multiple pie flavors are required to satisfy the differing palates and strong opinions. So we wondered, which pies are people discussing for the holiday? What better way to celebrate and answer that question than with a Gnip Cagefight.

Welcome to the Battle of the Pies!

For those of you that have been in a pie eating contest or had a pie in the face, you know this one will be a fight all the way down to the very last crumb. In one corner (well actually it is the Gnip Octagon so can you really have corners, oh well) we have The Traditionalist, pumpkin pie and in the opposite corner, The New Comer, pecan pie. Without further ado, Ladies and Gentleman, Let’s Get Ready to Rumble, wait wrong sport. Let’s Fight!

Six Social Media Sources, Two Words, One Winner . . . And the Winner Is . . .

 Source   Pumpkin Pie   Pecan Pie   Winning Ratio 
 Pumpkin Pie to Pecan Pie 
Twitter X 4:1
Facebook X 5:1
Google+ X 6:1
Newsgator X 3:1
WordPress X 5:1
WordPress Comments  X 2:1
Overall +6 Winner! +0 :(

We looked at one week’s worth of data across six of the top social media sources and determined that pumpkin pie “takes the cake” (so to speak) across every source.

In this case, it is interesting to point out that in sources like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and WordPress we see higher winning ratios, while sources that tend to have higher latency such as Newsgator and WordPress Comments were a little more even. Is this because, on further consideration, pecan pie sounds pretty good? Or is it that everyone will have to have two pies and, with pecan as the traditional second, it is highly discussed?

Top Pie Recipes

Even though pumpkin pie was our clear winner, we thought it would be fun to share a few of the most popular holiday pie recipes by social media source:

  1. Twitter – Cook du Jour Gluten-Free Pumpkin Pie and Pecan Pie Video Recipe from joyofcooking.com
  2. Facebook – Ben Starr’s Pumpkin Bourbon Pecan Pie Recipe
  3. Newsgator – BlogHer’s Pumpkin Pecan Roulade with Orange Mascarpone Cream Pie Recipe
  4. WordPress and WordPress Comments – Chocolate Bourbon Pecan Pie from allrecipes.com

Non-Traditional Thanksgiving Pies

Another interesting fact that came out of this Cagefight was the counts of non-traditional Thanksgiving pies that were mentioned across the social media sources we surveyed. Though we rarely find these useful for communicating numerical values effectively, you can’t not have a pie chart in this post.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Launching Gnip MarketStream & Partnership with StockTwits

November 17th, 2011
No Comments

While the market has been on its roller coaster ride across the past month, Gnip has kept its collective head down and stayed busy on behalf of our Investment Management clients (hedge funds, HFTs, asset managers, etc.). That hard work has paid off and we have two exciting announcements to make today.

  • Launch of Gnip MarketStream: Our hedge fund clients have been quite vocal in their desire for a package incorporating the most relevant social media data streams into a single low-latency, high-volume solution. We’re proud to answer their needs with the launch of Gnip MarketStream, a realtime data solution that packages the incredibly rich and broad “voice of the market” Twitter stream with the uniquely deep and targeted “voice of the trader” StockTwits stream.
  • Premium Partnership with StockTwits: An integral component of the Gnip MarketStream is StockTwits social media data. We’re thrilled to announce this partnership with StockTwits, the leading realtime financial platform for the investment community and creator of the $(TICKER) tag. The StockTwits stream is a curated, defined-demographic, realtime social data stream focused on investment decisions and analysis. Gnip now provides streaming access to the full StockTwits firehose of social data, and offers access to historical content as far back as 2009.

While the use of social media data by the investment community has included use of this data in news analysis and equity research, the primary adoption of this data across the last six months has been as a trading indicator. By combining the strengths of both the Twitter stream and the StockTwits stream, Gnip MarketStream provides investment professionals unparalleled access to relevant social data at time when social media has become an increasingly vital channel for news and market sentiment.

For more information about Gnip MarketStream or StockTwits data, contact trading@gnip.com.

Gnip Cagefight #1: Beer vs. Wine

October 18th, 2011
4 Comments

Welcome to the very first edition of the Gnip Cagefight! Over the next couple of weeks we’ll select a common word pair to enter the Gnip Octagon to fight to the finish in a no holds barred battle of Tweets. Two words will enter. Only one will leave.

In addition to crowning the victor, we’ll also call out some of the fun, interesting, strange, and bizarre trends that we glean from the data. Leave us a comment with any contenders you’d like to see in the future.

Now without further delay, let’s dive into our first Gnip Cagefight… Put your hands together for Wine vs. Beer!

And the Winner is . . .

We looked at one week of Tweets that contained the words “beer” or “wine,” and beer was the more commonly used term, appearing in 53.1% of those tweets vs. 48.1% for wine. Now you might be saying, “Hey, that’s more than 100%!” You are correct! That’s because beer and wine appear together about 13,801 times–along with an uncomfortable hangover, we presume. (Is this an opportunity to sell aspirin?)

With beer as our victor, we wanted to answer the age old question . . .

What time is Beer Thirty?

To answer this question, we analyzed the volume of Tweets containing the term “beer” throughout each day and averaged that across the week’s worth of data we collected. Each Tweet’s time was moved into the time zone of the Tweeter and normalized against the daily cycle of Tweet volume. Based on the graph below, true beer thirty is 5pm local time. This gives great meaning to the saying “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.”

Beer Drinkers have a Wider Vocabulary than Wine Drinkers

Another fascinating tidbit that came out of the data was that beer drinkers have a wider vocabulary than wine drinkers. Normalizing for the number of words used, we find that beer drinkers use 14% more distinct words than wine drinkers. Wine drinkers tend to use the same idioms, for example, “glass of wine” or “red wine,” more than beer drinkers use their most common phrases. Does this mean that beer drinkers are 14% smarter than wine drinkers? Or that they use very creative spelling? We won’t wade any further into that question, but you can be the judge.

That’s all for our inaugural Gnip Cagefight. Hope you enjoyed it and be sure to let us know what what words you’d like to see in the octagon in the future.

Steve Jobs – Rest in Peace

October 7th, 2011
No Comments

Steve Jobs was an innovator, entrepreneur and visionary leader who had an enormous impact on every one of us.  He brought warmth and humanity to the world of technology and in the process changed the entire the way we as humans interact with each other.  The path he blazed was quickly followed by others and even if you don’t own an Apple product, the computer/tablet/phone you are using is better because of him.

The impact he had on us made his death that much more profound and the reaction on Twitter was immediate and immense.  Word spread rapidly, peaking at 50,000 Tweets per minute within 30 minutes.  At that point, Tweets about Jobs accounted for almost 25% of all Tweets being sent globally.

Tweets per Minute

Looking at the content of those Tweets, you see expressions of sadness and loss, thanks for everything he did, and a celebration of his genius and talent.  All sentiments we felt here at Gnip.

Top Terms

Thank you for everything Steve.  The world is a poorer place without you.  Rest in peace.

« Older Entries

Follow Gnip

Archive

Recent Posts
Categories
Tags
activity data activity streams api api rate limits apis boulder colorado data aggregators data collection data consumers data delivery data feeds data filtering data filters data normalization data producers data publishers data sources data streaming data streams delicious digg facebook firehose flickr gnip hiring http keyword filters metadata normalization poll polling power track push realtime data rest rss social data social media social media data tweets twitter twitter data xml xmpp
Blogroll

Recent Tweets