The more I work in the social media field, the more I realize that there’s such a treasure trove of data and insights to be gleaned from this domain. Social media, used right, can truly be a powerful force.
For example, take a look at this this video below that details the social interactions of twitter users in Singapore who talk about our local telcos SingTel, StarHub and M1.
Exploring the social media with three telcos on Twitter from JamiQ on Vimeo.
It’s a fascinating look at how your brand can be hijacked on Twitter, and this video is an R&D piece of work done by JamiQ, whom I work for.
The voice and script for the video is done by me, but full thanks goes to my exceedingly capable data analyst-cum-visualizer Shanyang, who trawled through the data and build the whole darn visualization. I just told the story.
A few tangential points I want to highlight:
- This — i.e. data visualization — is the future of journalism. Journalists — and to a lesser extent, bloggers — are still needed to piece together a good coherent narrative, but for sources you can turn to crowdsourcing. There’s no better place to start than the social media space.
- There were a lot more data points in the twitter relationship map that we didn’t chart. Only twitter users that have relationships were charted, else the map would have a lot more data points that would bloat the visualization and confuse the story.
- Looking at individual users is only the tip of the iceberg. It is possible, for example, to cross compare what users say between two telcos and find out the common topics that they talk about. For example, in July 2010, there was a lot more chatter comparing all three telcos. The reason? Singaporeans comparing iPhone4 pricing plans, which was just launched that month.
Disclaimer: I work for JamiQ full-time doing business development.
