Introduction / Background
And suddenly,
everyone knew and talked about it: Facebook bought Oculus Rift (a company that has never sold one product) and since then, Virtual
Reality is a hot topic.
The digital technology landscape is changing daily:
Start-ups, new inventions, the tech giants deliver faster and better products
almost daily to the consumer market. While the news about some innovations
go viral globally in less than a day, other technologies seem to pass
unnoticed. Social Media plays an important role spreading the news: By favoring,
liking, sharing, commenting, users vote.
But who are the ones that share the news that go viral, first? On Friday, October 10th, the news about
a new VR headset called “VR One” spread rapidly in the tech world. I want to
follow that news through Twitter to see who the gatekeepers, bottlenecks,
influencers are. For the field of marketing and communications, it is vital to
know who influences what people talk about. Social network analysis offers a
unique opportunity to explore this.
Primary Question
Who are the
Twitter influencers in digital technology, especially Virtual reality, related news?
Hypothesis
There are a
few individuals / news-sites that functions as gate keepers or spin doctors in
the technology news world. These vary from region to region.
Data
I have downloaded
two datasets with NodeXL from the Twitter Search Network. The first 100 Tweets
with the hashtag #Zeiss VR One and 1000 more Tweets with the same hashtag from
three days later. The dataset includes many attributes such as the complete
text of the Tweets, whether it was a retweet or a new one. What kind of link
the tweets were referring to.
Methodology/Important Network Measures:
The data
provides me with a lot of attributes which I can utilize. First, I will analyze
which twitter accounts served as the main sources. Using the attributes, I will
try to comprehend, whether country or background play a role. Finally, I would
like to identify the main influencers of this network.
1 comment:
We've discussed, so no long comment here. Good description of what you'll do, but given your knowledge of the product and company, I would expect to see a bit more insight on how your results can be used by Zeiss. You can get at it by coming up with a sharper Question; yes, you want to know who the influencers are, but what does that mean for current and future marketing efforts, for example?
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