The recent launch of our re-syndication partnership with bitly allows us to see the connections between conversations and clicks like never before. Using simple analysis techniques to delve into rich data sets we are able to identify key influencer events, local variations in interests and which companies are best able to ride the wave of excitement around a breaking story.
When focusing on the week leading up to Skyfall’s U.S. opening on November 9, we discovered that people from 180 countries visited more than 2,300 different websites discussing Skyfall, covering reviews, trailers, interviews, the soundtrack and other angles.

Check out our latest Infographic: Whether you were first in line at the mall by 8pm on Thanksgiving day, avoided the crowds with a CyberMonday online shopping spree or just spent a quiet weekend checking your Twitter and Facebook feeds, Black Friday deals were probably an inescapable part of your holiday weekend.

Today, we’re rounding up some of the top Social Data stories on the Web that you might have missed. From the government, to politics to customer targeting, the potential for using Social Media to derive insights is seemingly endless!

It’s hard to believe it’s only been six months since I joined DataSift as CEO and we launched the company in the U.S. Since then we’ve grown from just a handful of customers in the U.K. to more than 250 corporate customers in over 20 countries. The list includes some of the top social media monitoring companies, business intelligence and news organizations and a growing list of Fortune 500 companies. Given my six-month mark at the helm of the company, I thought I’d share not only a few of our milestones, but highlight the trends and demand we’re seeing in the market.

Earlier this month the Electronic Frontier Foundation published their annual study of the privacy policies for top Internet companies. Twitter was ranked with an impressive 3.5 stars out of 4, (one of the highest on the list), highlighting its work across four areas: openness with data demands, transparency regarding requests, whether or not they fight in court for users’ privacy requests and whether or not they do so in Congress.

The first few days are make-or-break for a blockbuster movie, as reviews and box-office receipts pour in. With the huge hype and anticipation around Prometheus, we thought it would be fun to use DataSift to look across Twitter to see if Ridley Scott has a hit on his hands. During our analysis, we measured the sentiment of conversations around the film, totaling over 53,000 posts from nearly 40,000 people over the last 22 days.

If you had traded based on signals today to buy/sell Facebook stock, how would you have done? Probably pretty well! We’ve been closely monitoring Twitter’s social data and its relation to the Facebook stock price. What we found is pretty interesting. The positive and negative views on Twitter mirrored the fluctuations in Facebook stock price today.