The Power of Hindsight: Using Historical Data to Make Better Decisions

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© 2014 Brandwatch.com

Webinar/The Power of Hindsight: Using historical data to make better decisions

CMO, Brandwatch@willmcinnes

Hosted by Will McInnes

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© 2014 Brandwatch.com

Our speakers

VP, Data & Analytics,Text100

@MrPhilipKam

Phil KamDirector of Professional Services, Brandwatch

@molten_tofu

Nate WaltonData Scientist,

Twitter@DrSkippy

Scott Hendrickson

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© 2014 Brandwatch.com

Coming up

• Presentations

• Panel Discussion: The value of Hindsight

• Q&A

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© 2014 Brandwatch.com4

Don’t be shy/We’d love your participation

• Ask questions in the session chat

• Tweet about our discussion

@brandwatch

#brandwatchtips

A download and recording of the webinar will be made available after the event

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© 2014 Brandwatch.com© 2014 Brandwatch.com

Nate Walton, Brandwatch

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© 2014 Brandwatch.com

Really big stuff has happened more than once

• Back to 2008 to get more than one US presidential election

• Back to 2008 (again) to get more than one olympics (summer only)

• Can just squeeze in 3 world cups going back to 2006

Fool me once…

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The First Time Second Time Third Time

Things about to get interesting?

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© 2014 Brandwatch.com

It’s (probably) the best picture we have of a social network’s growth

• Even if other big networks have good historical data, $100 says they have no great way of mining it

• Twitter is a relatively sparse - every connection counts for marketing and for analysis

• From the time before the New York Times and Lady Gaga – can we figure out whether to invest in new networks before "everybody's doing it"?

Conversation about “obama” at 10:30 this morning

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© 2014 Brandwatch.com

New ways of measuring influence

• Track people's contributions across time, and include consistency as a measure of influence

• Extend our understanding of how current influencers became endemic to the social network – people whose celebrity is rooted in Twitter vs just an outlet through Twitter

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© 2014 Brandwatch.com© 2014 Brandwatch.com

Historical Data Examples

and Strategies@drskippy

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© 2014 Brandwatch.com

SXSW 2006-2012

(Top scale 0-4k tweets/hr; bottom scale 0-15k tweets/hr)

• 6 years of growth of Twitter and SXSW

• Main event and summer “panel picker” season

• See more detail at http://drskippy.github.io/netarcs/sxsw_stacked.png

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Q & A

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© 2014 Brandwatch.com© 2014 Brandwatch.com

Q & A

Interact and zoom at http://drskippy.github.io/netarcs/Big

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© 2014 Brandwatch.com© 2014 Brandwatch.comInteract and zoom at http://drskippy.github.io/netarcs/

https://www.mapbox.com/labs/twitter-gnip/brands

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© 2014 Brandwatch.com

3 Tips

1. Hypothesize, sample, analyze, visualize—repeat

2. Years of data – take into account changes in volume, language use, product names, etc.

3. Plan analysis strategies

– Mentions & frequency time series

– Natural Language Processing (NLP) – topics and sentiment

– Networks – Interactions and social graph

– Meta data – Images, links, geo-tagging

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© 2014 Brandwatch.com© 2014 Brandwatch.com

Panel Discussion

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© 2014 Brandwatch.com© 2014 Brandwatch.com

Q & A

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© 2014 Brandwatch.com

Find out more: brandwatch.com/hindsight

contact@brandwatch.com

facebook.com/brandwatch

@brandwatch

plus.google.com/+brandwatch1