Nexalogy became a partner by creating a Startup Weekend Toronto Nexalive microsite here. Creating it is simple; just plug in one #swtoronto hashtag. We captured some 3128 tweets and counting!

Sarah Jane Morris – Head of Developer Relations at Context.io – got to feel the electric atmosphere first hand. You can see she was one of the most active tweeters during the event according to Nexalive and you can read her account of this microcosm of the startup experience here.

Twitter analysis is all the rage at the moment, but the analysis that we most often see is pretty basic. One of the best is this analysis from the NYTimes Research Labs: Monitoring Twitter’s iPad Commentary. But while the presentation of their results is fantastic, there is more to social media analysis than counting keywords in Twitter. Or, as Annie Pettit of Conversition put it last week from the podium at the MRIA Net Gain 4.0 conference (and later tweeted), “Counting is not analysis“.

Counting is certainly part of analysis, but what we most often see passing as “social media analysis” is just the first step. While there is some value to counting tweets, it’s much more important to analyze the concepts contained throughout all of the tweets in a dataset, whether those words represent likely keywords or not. It’s only using more advanced methodologies that can we get a complete view of a conversation.

To demonstrate this, Nexalogy Environics’ Guido Vieira performed a Twitter study of the 24 hours of discussion following the launch of the iPad in the Montreal area. As you can see, the results are very interesting. Read to the end of the PDF – this analysis suggests a very important methodological issue to pay attention to related to Twitter analysis.

Download the PDF [500kb]: NexalogyEnvironics-iPadLaunchAnalysis1

This article and several like it have cherry-picked alarmist and incorrect tweets to make their point, but at Nexalogy that kind of anecdotal evidence is never good enough. So I took some Twitter data yesterday to analyze the quality and tenor of the information being spread through Twitter. The answer? Very encouraging.

To produce this analysis, I took data using the keywords “Swine” or “Porcine” (French for swine), in any language, within 15km of Montreal, anytime between April 25 and April 27 inclusive. This strategy resulted in a dataset of about 560 individual tweets which I analyzed semantically after translating key terms from French to English. This Lexical map represents the 100 most important terms or concepts in the whole Twitter discussion.

The story that emerges is crystal clear. Far from being a worthless mix of junk facts, hype, and hysteria, the Twitter dialog in Montreal is serious, non-alarmist, and concentrates on credible links to published information people want to spread among their network.

The key communications vectors are the AP (@breakingnews), Reuters, the CDC (@cdcemergency), Radio-Canada (here represented by ‘radio’), and Montreal radio station CJAD. As well, one of the most important links in the dataset was to the Google Map of the spread of the H1N1 virus, which by all accounts is a credible, serious reference.

The key actors – particularly those who made news in the timeframe of this analysis – are all very credible and prominent in this discussion by any standard. President Obama, the WHO, various health ministers, and of course the CDC were all visible, while there was very little trace of conspiracy theories or anything like that.

There was some joking and sarcasm – bounded in the map by the dashed red line – but ironically perhaps much of this includes the (small) discussion of Twitter’s power to misinform and people dismissing the whole thing as media hype. Plus, of course, the requisite pig and bacon jokes!

All in all, it’s pretty clear based on this relatively small dataset that the nay-sayers and pessimists are wrong on this one. Anything can (and does) appear in Twitter feeds – but to dismiss the service based on a few alarmist or jokey tweets is seriously misguided. Overall, Twitter seems to be an impressive and sober channel for up-to-the-minute information, alerts, and discussion on an important issue like Swine Flu.

They already had a lot of the pieces in place when we started work on the project: Inter Pares is a first-rate organization, and they had engaged an experienced design team (Good Company Communications) and developer (David Berman Communications).

Our contribution was to look at the blog conversations about Inter Pares’ program areas and online giving campaigns and give them strategic direction about for this season’s campaign. What motivates people to online charitable giving? What kind of messaging do people respond to?

Without going into all the details, we learned a lot about how to put together a successful online holiday giving campaign – and Inter Pares (and the project team) put it together very nicely: Give Something Big/Emballez-vous.

So if you’re searching for a way to give someone an important gift but aren’t really interested in adding to the consumer frenzy of the holidays, please consider Giving Something Big.

Army of Two

As you can see from the Lexical Map, there are four main areas of importance. The upper part of the map, contained within the region of the dashed lines, indicates lots of activity related to trading and second hand sales. While all popular titles will see this kind activity, Ao2 was unusual in that many players specifically cited the length of mission play (just ten hours on average) and MSRP ($59.99) as reasons to buy second hand, trade, or even rent.

Although players found limited overall game re-playability, there was significant discussion related XBox Live – people wrote about replaying to gain Achievement Points. This is represented by the coloured group on the left of the map. Its no coincidence that it is next to the region associated with trading and second hand sales, as those discussions are clearly related.

In an interesting note, Michael Capps talked about this very issue (loss of first hand sales due to the second hand market) in a recent interview in gamesindustry.biz, specifically with respect to Gears of War. Gears of War was another game that was frequently mentioned along with Army of Two, not just in “want to have” lists, but also in trading and the second hand market.

Interestingly, there was also a discussion about several of EA’s licenses and movie production – this can be seen in the third area of the map on the right hand side. Here we can see conversations around Mirror’s Edge, Dead Space, and Need for Speed, which were all associated with Army of Two. Just a few weeks after we had completed the mini study, EA and Universal announced a partnership to produce an Ao2 movie.

The final region on the map is activity related to trades and second hand sales – not of games, but hardware. Army of Two was frequently sold alongside hardware, for example people looking to upgrade their systems.

Aside from these issues, the title was very well received by those who wanted to have a two player co-op experience, and there were many examples of gamers buying the game to play with a younger sibling or other family member. Gamers particularly enjoyed the special co-op moves, and the ability to “pimp” out their weapons with various customizations.

As a followup to our look at the Obama-McCain contest that we published in August, we decided to use this straightforward approach to take a look at a day of blog posts about Sarah Palin.

We built the dataset using posts from Monday, October 20 (840 posts total). This was the Monday following Palin’s appearance on Saturday Night Live. Our assumption going in was that the discussion about that would completely dominate.

What we found, however, was very interesting:

Conversation Capture - Sarah Palin - Oct 20

As you can see in the Lexical Map, there was a large discussion about SNL, but there was also a very large discussion about an interview Palin gave with the Christian Broadcasting Network, in which she discussed a Constitutional Amendment that would prevent states from recognizing Gay marriage, among other things. In addition, a lot of attention was given to a speech that Jon Stewart gave in Boston.

Even more interesting, though, was the cluster related to the way Alaska’s oil revenues are distributed. By the end of last week there was quite a bit of discussion about the hypocrisy of Palin’s attacks on Obama as a socialist and Alaska’s oil revenue policies – but here we see that even on that Monday, the issue was clearly emerging in the blogosphere.

One of the other tools we like to use for our Conversation Capture is to build a list of word co-occurrences. Here is a sample excerpt:

We see here as well that although the word “socialist” does appear often, it was not only used in the context of a description of her attacks on Obama but also related to the oil revenue situation in Alaska. As well, it is clear that her position on gay marriage is significant – more significant than Joe the Plumber, for sure.

The following map was generated using a dataset including all blog posts (there were 946 total posts after filtering for spam) for a structured series of queries between July 14 and July 18. We then performed a lexical analysis that identified and mapped the relationship between the top 150 words in the dataset.

Observations

• McCain and Obama are both located at the center of the map – which is to be expected, since these were used as keywords to establish the dataset. All of the words on the map are arranged by their relationship to their nearest 5 other nodes (words), and the relative size of each node is directly proportional to its resonance in the dataset.

• When performing such an analysis, words that appear on the map tend to self-organize into clusters that define concepts that are important. In this case, there were 6 significant conceptual clusters related to important events of that week: Gov. Mark Sanford’s gaffe in an interview on CNN; Michigan speeches by both Obama and McCain; McCain’s speech at the La Raza Convention; issues related to free trade and trade agreements; the “flip-flop” question, and general political and social issues that are at play during the election season.

• In terms of positives for McCain during that week, the strong cluster related to his speech at La Raza is particularly interesting. In this speech, McCain was quoted as saying that he’s an “unapologetic supporter” of free trade. “Unapologetic” and “supporter” are the words which connected this cluster with the general free trade cluster to its left (and this connection is largely responsible for their proximity on the map). That is not to say that this declaration is the only thing in play for McCain on this issue – as we read the blog posts that make up the free trade cluster, we noticed that the controversy surrounding McCain’s trip to Ottawa in June was still very evident in the text.

• The other negative cluster related to McCain was related to Sanford’s inability to distinguish specific ways that McCain’s economic policy proposals differed from those of Bush in an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN. One of the important innovations of this kind of lexical analysis is that it allows us to identify which stories resonate the most in a given period of time, and the fact that a single story related to a single on-air interview by a McCain surrogate even appears on this graph demonstrates the influence that even a small problem can have once it’s picked up in the blogs.

• It’s also interesting to note the other individuals who appear among the top 150 words on the map. Other than Obama and McCain, we also see the following people: Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Phil Gramm, Austan Goolsbee, and Sanford.
  • Gramm, the former McCain Campaign co-chair, was in the news due to his assertion that America had “become a nation of whiners” following which he resigned his position in the campaign. His name is directly connected to the words “nation,” “political,” “economic,” and “advisor.”
  • Austan Goolsbee is Obama’s key economic advisor and appears because he is widely cited by bloggers that take a close look at Obama’s economic and trade policies.
  • The fact that both Clintons appear among the top 150 words in the map is an indication of the importance they still wield related to this year’s election cycle.
• The last cluster to note is related to the “flip-flop” question. This is a relatively small cluster but contains words directly related to Obama including “fisa” and “public finance.” At the time of this analysis, this question was still very much alive.

As the election draws closer we’ll perform at least one additional analysis of this kind that will allow us to see how these issues have developed since mid-July. Feel free to ask questions or note any additional trends in the comments.

The story focuses on the debate raging around aluminum, industrial development, hydro power dams and jobs in this small island nation. Not suprisingly, the story also reinforces much of the findings presented in the Nexalogy’s study Alcan & Alcoa in Iceland - Iceland has not been culturally acustomed to debating its future and making choices- for centuries the land and sea offered a natural bounty and beauty that produced an economy based largely on fishing. But now all of that has changed. Iceland is a modern society now, and technology-oriented businesses have largely replaced traditional ways. But the future is uncertain and the population holds a deep love for its natural environment.

Big multinationals see easy opportunities and “win-win” scenarios, but as National Geographic points out, companies that ignore the popular pyche and deep land-oriented history of this beautiful island may find it difficult to proceed with their projects.

Think of the modern corporation less as a monolithic, fixed structure and more as an entity presiding over a kind of business ecosystem or a set of interlocking ‘value based networks’, where value is defined by the firm and its different stakeholders according to the nature of the relationship”

Download the PDF: Alcan and Alcoa in Iceland