Monitoring Twitter with a data visualization tool

Infomous is a tool which explores conversations about your brand or to monitor your reputation thanks to mapping from social media, blogs, RSS feeds, consumer reviews and others sources. You can zoom into specific times and locations to pinpoint topics of conversation to identify the most vocal sources and above all create your clouds to share your findings.

It’s been a while i wanted to use this tool and it’s done with my work with NGO Shark Citizen. The idea was to identify conversations on Twitter because we have a strong community on it with many professionnals who preserves sharks, ecosystem and oceans.

An other explanation was to organize a map to bring to Shark Citizen’s team who are not on Twitter and who want to read instantaneously some news in ecological fields.

Moreover, as the team is located in worldwide (Réunion and Mayotte islands, Paris, USA) it’s a help to bring the same news at everyone and exchange each other.

Methodology :

149 Twitter accounts have been choosen and analysed with this ranking :

• Research ( PhDcandidates, oceanography, research, shark scientists, marine biologists, shark researchers)

• Officials NGO, nonprofits in shark conservation, shark education, shark research, shark finning

• Activism : personal accounts from shark activists, sharks advocates, volunteers, marine conservationists

• Underwater : (Freedivers, sharks photographers, sharks expeditions, documentary filmakers)

• Experts in marine socio economics field (fishing quota, economy)

One condition : Persons who have an influence in preservation and conservation with sharks AND who tweet weekly or regularly.

I have used the tool http://twitrss.me to generate a RSS feed with the 149 accounts. I have combined the feeds with http://www.rssfusion.org.

Positive things :

• It’s very easy to understand online conversations intuitively with clouds
• Personalized navigation : you choose what’s relevant.
• Monitoring on Twitter without to have an account : important to unify a team.
• Share the mapping to the professionnals of NGO.
• Analyse some trends with keywords : trends in ecological field.
• The gain in time to find some news to share with your community.

Negative things :

• The algorithm is above all for english language.
• It’s impossible to know when the tool is updating the feeds.
• Loading time of the mapping is quite long.