FreshNetworks Blog

Old Trafford, Manchester (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

At 09:20 this morning Sir Alex Ferguson retired after 26 years in charge of Manchester United. The club, and the manager, are respected and supported far from the city of Manchester, and reaction was quick to spread on Twitter. In many analyses of event and how Twitter reacts to them, the focus is on volume – just how many people are talking about an issue. But more interesting than this is what people are saying.

There is a hypothesis that when there is ‘breaking news’ (at least on Twitter), most of the discussions convey the same information – people either retweeting the original message or people conveying the same information to their followers that lots of others are doing at the same time. So in this case immediately after the announcement, whilst they may use different words, we would expect people to be conveying the simple message: Sir Alex Ferguson has retired.

But is this true – what did people actually discuss on Twitter in the first hour after his retirement was announced?

What we did

We captured every Tweet that clearly discussed Sir Alex Ferguson during the first hour after his retirement was announced shortly before 09:20 this morning. Using Datasift, we captured all Tweets that included the terms “Alex Ferguson” or “#fergie’ or ‘#mufc’.

In total we captured 95,312 Tweets in the first hour of discussion on Twitter – or about 26 Tweets every second.

What we found

First some basic stats about the discussions on Twitter in the first hour after the announcement:

• 68% of people discussing the retirement were male (16% were female and the remaining 16% had genders that could not be determined from Twitter)
• With 4.3% of all discussions, the news was actually discussed most in Manchester; London came second (3.8%). The global impact of the club is reflected with Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and South Africa being in the top 10 locations for discussions
• 22% of Tweets were people retweeting other people’s content; the remaining 78% were original Tweets
• The most retweeted account was the club themselves. This was followed by a number of accounts in Indonesia (UtdIndonesia and detiksport). The most mentioned UK news provider during the first hour was SkySportsNews.

With only 22% of Tweets as clear retweets, there was a lot of original Twitter content being produced. So what were people actually discussing:

• Just over one third of Tweets (34%) were simple statements that Sir Alex Ferguson had retired
• The next largest group (26% of Tweets) were reflecting on their own experiences or thoughts – memories of the club and what Sir Alex’s time there meant for them
• A further 14% of Tweets were thanking Sir Alex for what he had done for the club or indeed for their own experiences (a trend started by the club themselves in their announcement)

Some topics were less popular but noteworthy:

• 360 people (0.7% of all Tweets) were wishing Sir Alex luck in or sending their best wishes for his future
• 53 people (0.01%) were worried that Sir Alex might have died

So the first hour on Twitter was an interesting place, and the discussions were more varied than just retweeting or repeating the simple fact of Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement. In fact a significant proportion of Tweets were reflecting on what his role as manager had meant to them and the memories they had of his time with the club. This kind of reflection and content is altogether more interesting than mere retweets and statements of fact and shows Twitter at its best – connecting personal experiences and opinions to larger events.

Listen, Understand, Act (Photo credit: highersights)

According to Altimeter, 42% of businesses in the US are prioritising Social Media Listening in 2013 – putting real focus on how they sift through and learn from the conversations in social media. But a recent study of US consumers found that 51% of them do not want brands to be listening to what they say online. As a greater emphasis is placed on social media listening and big data, the tensions with consumer privacy will also rise.

The report, by Netbase, is based on a survey of 1,062 US consumers and highlights the challenges brands will face as they increasingly listen to and act on conversations in social media.

• Most consumers (68%) realise that brands are listening to what they say online
• Just over half (51%) want to be able to talk to their friends and contact in social media without being listened to in this way; 43% would go further, saying that being listened to is an invasion of their privacy
• Finally, 64% of consumers only want companies to respond when they are directly spoken to

These numbers are confusing and difficult to interpret, and when you add in the data about what consumers do think brands should do in social media they become more so:

• 48% of consumers say that brands should listen in order to improve products
• 58% say that brands should respond to negative comments online

The numbers are all over the place so what can we learn from this?

The data is confusing which may be a result of poor research, or indeed may (also?) reflect the fact that understanding of social media listening is confused for consumers. That brands can listen in to conversations they are having with friends and contacts online can feel intrusive, but when the potential benefits of this are explained, more consumers are willing to accept this.

This is probably the best way to understand this data and to begin to understand how consumers will react to social media listening: they do not like it, but they like the benefits that they may get from brands listening to them. So for listening to be really effective, brands will have to make sure they have worked out the consumer value proposition before people make it more difficult for them to access their conversations online.

Locks (Photo credit: m thierry)

Having attended the Westminster eForum’s keynote seminar recently, which looked at preparing for the new European Data Protection Framework, here’s a quick summary of what the new regulation includes, and what people at the seminar were saying about it.

Summary of the new regulation

• An updated definition of personal data, which now explicitly mentions online identifiers, locational data, and genetic data.
• Consent will have to be explicit.
• Organisations must actively report data breaches.
• Some organisations will be required to appoint a Data Protection Officer (DPO).
• Abolishing the fee (max £10) which organisations can charge for subject access requests.
• New “right to be forgotten”, whereby in some circumstances individuals can request that an organisation erase all the personal data it holds on them.
• In some situations, national supervisory authorities will be able to take action against organisations in other EU Member States.
• Supervisory authorities will potentially be able to fine up to €1m or up to 2% of a company’s annual turnover.

Pros

Largely as expressed at the seminar by David Smith of the ICO

• Necessary modernisation – there was general consensus from all the speakers that the current framework is now out of date, and doesn’t adequately protect people’s privacy rights – especially their online privacy on account of significant technological developments in recent years, including widespread use of social media networks.
• Enhanced rights for individuals.
• Legal obligations for data processors.
• Businesses will be held accountable for having the correct systems and practices in place.
• Improved consistency (as opposed to harmonisation) across the EU.

Cons / challenges

• How to strike the right balance between better protecting people’s online privacy and use of people’s personal data by companies, and not putting overly onerous data protection burdens on businesses (especially SMEs), and potentially stifling technological and business innovation. Certainly, there has been an unprecedented number of suggested amendments made (estimated to be a record 5000!), and these will take some time to be processed and resolved.
• How to strike the right balance between using data for good (e.g. Lord McNally gave the example of helping identify and work with dysfunctional families), and not overstepping the privacy mark.
• Many of the speakers said that the “right to be forgotten” was an overstatement, with the title proving a problem. In reality it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to be totally forgotten everywhere online. However, the main point is for individuals to be able to say they object to their data being processed.
• Clive Davenport, of the FSB, was particularly concerned about the potential burden the new regulation would put on SMEs, and in general the feasibility of complete compliance was questioned throughout the seminar.
• Nick Stringer, of the IAB UK, spoke in favour of including the “pseudonymous data” subset to provide a reasonable and legal basis for businesses to process information. He further highlighted the need for striking the right balance between safeguarding online privacy and providing consumer benefits (e.g. data enables more effective marketing), and promoting business (data drives the digital economy, and digital advertising also drives many SMEs and start-ups).
• Mina Mehta of GSK also called for the balance between prescription versus proportionality

One clear message was that the framework is still a work in progress, and therefore people can and should act now in order to try and shape and amend it. Negotiations are expected to commence in June 2013, with results expected by the end of the year and the final version in place for summer 2014. So there is still time to act to try and make changes. However, the ICO also pointed out that there’s also time to get your house in order.

Nobody gets me Bitcoins! (Photo credit: zcopley)

In the current economic climate, many people have been looking into alternative investment opportunities, or safe places to put their money outside of the banking system. Options such as precious gems, or fine wine, are regularly discussed. One of the rising stars in this space is the Bitcoin market.

Bitcoins are a decentralised digital currency which uses open source technology to trade coins between users all over the world. Bitcoins are obtained by completing increasingly difficult mathematical calculations, this system ensuring only that a limited number of Bitcoins are available and that no one organisation controls the flow of coins.

Using social data to predict consumer behaviour, or even the value of goods, is nothing new, and many traders have been looking to include social metrics into their trading algorithms. Various academic studies have also highlighted predictive qualities of social data in the equity markets. However, because there are so many factors involved in pricing most financial instruments, it can be extremely difficult to accurately predict how markets will change.

Bitcoin however has several characteristics which make it an ideal market for social data prediction:

• The value of Bitcoins is determined almost solely on market demand, because the number of coins on the market is predictable and are not tied to any physical goods

• Bitcoin traders tend to be in the same demographic as social media users, and so their attitudes, opinions and sentiment towards Bitcoin are well documented

• Bitcoin is predominately traded by individuals rather than large institutions

• Events that affect Bitcoin value are disseminated first and foremost on social media

We intend to test the hypothesis that Bitcoins could prove an exciting testbed for social prediction, and give us a greater understanding of how publicly expressed sentiment and behaviour actually impacts the value of a commodity.

What do you think? Can social data be used to predict Bitcoin values?

Forget-me-nots (Photo credit: churchofpunk)

After just a few days in the job, the UK’s first youth crime commissioner, Paris Brown, resigned over some of her past Twitter postings. There are no doubt many posts that she wishes could be deleted, forgotten forever, and she is not alone. As we leave more and more behind us in our digital exhaust there will no doubt be Tweets, photos, comments and the like that all of us would like to be forgotten. And not just because they were misjudged in the first place, as was the case with Paris Brown.

Social media will provide a continual record of our lives – of the detail of what we did and what we said at a particular time on a particular day in the past. Some people liken this to a diary, but it is different in two fundamental ways:

1. A diary is always written after the event, reporting something we did in the (near) past; our social media records were composed in the heat of the moment, in real time
2. What we write in a diary is selective, we think about what it is from the day that we want to record; our social media records are less so – our posts and photos often go through fewer filters

So social media is leaving behind us a very different set of records – records that are written in real-time, are less filtered, and tend to discuss the detail of what we were doing or thinking at a particular point in the past. And, in many cases, they can be seen by anybody – without us there to explain where this particular record fitted into our lives at the time; without context.

These new records present a number of potential challenges to us in the future, not least to how we remember and think about our past.

• We tend to forget detail – except for the most special of memories. Rather we remember events at a macro-level – we know broadly speaking where we were and when, what we were doing at different stages in our lives, and the things that happened to us. Our social media records are only the detail – they provide no context and no structure to our memories. Just a set of detailed comments that we will not be able to escape from.
• We think of the past through the lens of today – we interpret what we did and said based on our current experiences, beliefs and moral compass. This is why even reading diaries from your childhood can be cringe-worthy. Our social media records will come with no interpretation; there will be no escaping what we said or thought in the past.

So, our social media records will provide a different view of our own pasts (for ourselves and for others) than we might currently want to portray. And this is why we might want to explore a right to be forgotten online, a right for our posts to be removed or replaced and for us to curate our own pasts. Not for that odd ill thought-through Tweet, but because social risks changing the way we make and store memories of our lives.