I’ve released the next version of Tag-O-Matic, you can see the documentation and download information here.
Tag-o-Matic is a research tool for helping you to compose tweets. The first version showed you the most popular hash tags for a given set of terms; the new version also shows you the most frequently referenced users for the terms as well.
Take a look at it, give it a whirl, and let me know what you think!
I wrote, earlier, about how the attempt to hijack the hash tag #DontDoubleMyRate didn’t really work out too well. Well, a few days have passed, and now the hashtag du jour is #Forward, and once again conservatives are attempting to take over the tag for their own purposes.
Will they fail like last time? Nope. This time they’re pulling it off. In a review of roughly 15,000 posts up to midnight, 4/30/2012 (EDT), the uses of #Forward are:
Roughly two thirds of all tweets using the hash tag are anti-Obama.
Compare this to what happened with #DontDoubleMyRate:
I think we can draw the conclusion that if you come up with a hash tag that personally resonates with your constituency, they’ll tweet their hearts out. The number of tweets for the #DontDoubleMyRate hash tag is about 4 times larger than for #Forward, and the difference is probably the added supporters of Obama. I suspect that there’s going to be a consistent pool of conservatives who will jump on (and trash) any hash tag Obama is using, and if the pro-obama tweeple don’t get excited, the hash tag is going to go down in flames.
Methodology:
I retrieved 15,038 tweets using the hashtag #forward prior to 5/1/2012, which was all the tweets using #forward I could find. Of those, I randomly examined 375 to determine if the tweet was pro- or anti-obama or just unrelated (a few soccer and basketball forwards in the mix). That determination is admittedly subjective, but is really only likely to be in question for a small # of tweets (most were abundantly clear that they were anti-obama. Some required looking at the contents of a URL to determine the intent, and for the 5 or 6 that were that way I just marked them as no being anti-Obama.)The sample size allows me to estimate the percentage of anti-Obama tweets is 68% +/- 5%, with a confidence level of 95%. Statistics FTW!
Connie Mack IV continued his lead in Twitter last week, with nearly a majority of all tweets about Florida’s US Senate candidates:
Bill Nelson came in second, but far behind Mack. LeMieux had a fairly small presence, and McCalister having so few tweets recorded that I had to go back and review it by hand to make sure my program didn’t have a bug!
When you look at the daily mentions, you can see how last week played out:
Connie Mack’s spike on 4/24 appears to be from two things: (1) many retweets of his congratulatory tweet to Romney for winning the primary, and (2) comments about his appearance on Chuck Todd’s show on MSNBC where Mack refused to say how he’d vote on student loans. A lot of those comments were not positive.
Still, by dominating the news, Connie Mack is sucking the oxygen out of the GOP primary race. That’s one of the advantages of holding a similar office — Mack is relevant today on issues that the winner of the race will confront next year.
On Tuesday night, 4/24/2012. President Barack Obama went on the Jimmy Fallon show, and produced the best ratings in years for Fallon and a big spike in twitter mentions:
Click to Enlarge
We can see the next day Twitter was abuzz. There’s been criticism of the President from the conservative side of things about the appearance, but it’s clear as a political move it was shrewd. We’ll see in next week’s analysis whether Saturday’s appearance at the White House Correspondent’s dinner will have the sam effect.
Mitt Romney, on the other hand, got a bit of a boost from his primary victories on Tuesday, but it was no where near what the President saw. Romney really needs to push harder on Social Media if he’s going to be competitive in the fall. Fortunately, he has plenty of time to work on it…
CBS news has an interesting piece about how the police are using Social Media to “monitor” (their word) the activities of groups like Occupy Wall Street, citing one case where prosecutors sought to use the Twitter feed of a protestor arrested for disorderly conduct.
The article mentions a report from the International Association of Chiefs of Police that said that roughly 90% of US law enforcement agencies have used social media.
What’s interesting, though, is that it appears that a lot of the usage has nothing to do with crime, per se. The report covers both the investigative uses of social media as well as more mundane things like creating a facebook page for police departments. The report does say that about 71% of the agencies have used Twitter for crime investigation, but that’s a fairly loose description — and when law enforcement is tasked with crimes that take place at least partially online, it’s not surprising that some one would look into the Twitter postings of a suspect.
The implication, though, of the article is that there is a large scale pre-crime monitoring of social media by the police. That’s not really supported by the facts…