There's little doubt that Twitter has become a very noisy place since its inception. The company generates billions of tweets per year, a number that has grown exponentially since co-founder Jack Dorsey tweeted "just setting up my twttr" in 2006.
As the number of tweets has exploded into the billions, it's become more challenging to see what's really going on with traditional dataviz tools like SQL statements, standard reports, and dashboards.
For this reason, Santiago Ortiz decided to try something a bit different. The self-described visual data scientist accessed a public list of Twitter employees accounts. From those 1,250 accounts, Ortiz scraped 100,000 tweets to create the following dataviz:
Twitter employees got wind of Ortiz's creation and began playing with it. Sure, it was cool, but they discovered that it was quite useful in a number of unexpected ways. Interestingly, Ortiz's dataviz revealed a slew of clusters – i.e., groups of nodes that appeared to represent intense conversations among Twitter employees. And these clusters were often informative. That is, they piqued the user's curiosity. For instance, the tool manifested interactions among:
- International Twitter teams, such as Japan and the UK
- Individual departments, such as marketing
- Two newly acquired companies
Note that Ortiz's dataviz doesn't necessarily lead to a simple "A ha!" moment. Rather, it prompts additional questions, exploration and discovery.
Simon Says
Over my career, I have seen management at many hidebound organizations reject new and potentially valuable forms of communication such as social media. Perhaps most CXOs think that tweeting is nothing less than a waste of time. Exhibit A: Only four percent of CEOs actively use Twitter. And, for all I know, maybe they're right.
If given access to the tools like the one described in this post, however, would so many feel this way? Would so many IT departments block Twitter at work (something ultimately futile in an era of BYOD)?
New tools might provide new insights. Change the tools and you may change the mind-set.
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