How a Riot Created a Powerful Search Tool

How a Riot Created a Powerful Search Tool
Lee Smallwood on the beginnings of NOD3x.

#socialmediamarketing   #googleplustools  

Originally shared by Lee Smallwood

What is NOD3x and Why was it developed?

Four  years ago [Aug 2010] nod3x.com  was in it's infancy and it wasn't publicly available to use then. I basically developed it to help me answer our client's increasing volume of questions relating to online social media discussions.

Then, during the London riots of 2011, I wanted to see if it was possible to predict which direction the rioters were heading based on people Tweeting about what was happening in their location.

We stored and processed the tweets, plotting the locations of those people posting a map in real-time and were able to determine the different directions that the rioters were heading.

Over the period of 8 days we processed just under 3 million Tweets.

We now process 2 million tweets daily...

After this, my mind went a bit crazy pondering on all the what ifs...:

• Do people ask different questions around a topic across different social platforms?

• Do men and women have different topical points of view, across different platforms?

• Does the same person write posts relating to specific topics differently from one social platform to another?

• Is it possible to track trends based upon what people discuss online as opposed to just keyword search behaviour?

• Is there a correlation between online search and social behaviour?

• Can we monitor the impact that media has on everyday people across social media, and vice versa?

• Is it possible to track sentiment relating to public opinions when government’s change or introduce new legislation?

The short answer to the above is - YES!

The task was and continues to be a challenging one - and we’re not finished yet...

Over the course of the last three years we've gone through three revisions visibly and 100's algorithmically. We now have proprietary algorithms in place that not only collects data and processes it but analyses it in real-time 20 times faster producing the following insights (amongst others):

• Influencer analysis
• Opinion analysis
• Location analysis
• Language detection
• Gender detection
• Which network has the most volume of related posts
• Best time of day to post
• Best day of the week to post
• Popular hashtags

These results are presented as a real-time infographic. Why did I call it a real-time infographic? Well, for me (as pretty as they are to look at), once you've collated the data to be designed as an infographic - it's all ready out of date! (Let alone when the infographic is ready to be published!)

Homophiliy Tech ~ "birds of a feather do flock together"  and they also attract others to the flock...

The NOD3x Dashboard displays all of the information that you'd want/expect to find within an infographic, what I've coined as  _swish_ of SNA and Viral: Who, What, Where, When, Why and How (David Amerland call's them 4Vs of Semantic Search in his book http://davidamerland.com/google-semantic-search.html - must read book if you haven't already...)

The future of NOD3x
Over the course of the next month, we're unveiling some new tech, processes and functionality that we hope you'll approve of.

This new 'stuff' implements what we've codenamed swish and looks at the behavioural correlations between social and search... 

Right now, our focus is on developing a unified suite of #SNA  tools that come together as a complete Social Media Research, Analysis and Marketing application.

Thanks to everyone for their continued support of our little app - without your feedback and critiques NOD3x wouldn't be where it is now...
#NOD3x   #socialnetworkanalysis   #businessintelligence