Haters Are Going To Hate…But They Aren’t Always Right
Here at DataSift we are big fans of YouTube and really love the new UI they launched a few weeks ago. At the same time that our team was admiring the sleek new site design that You Tube had just launched, we noticed YouTube was taking a hammering from online commentators and press. It seemed like EVERYONE hated the new UI! Were the “haters” right that the UI was terrible, or was a minority of “haters” not representative of the YouTube user base? We turned to Twitter to find out. The results will surprise you.
 |
 |
Our Inital Read: Lots of Complaints!
Our first step was to take a look at the The YouTube blog. We were really surprised at how the boards seemed to be full of complaints and calls for a return to the original layout that users were familiar with. All the while we were left thinking ‘well, actually we kinda like it’.
We thought the complainers might be wrong, and set out to find out what the truth was.
The main rollout of the new YouTube UI went live on the 2nd of December. We used the DataSift platform to quickly set up some streams to capture the real-time public reaction of You Tube users to the new design. (Our platform is so easy to use that someone from our Marketing team actually did most of the work.) The rule we set up for this stream captured any tweet that contained the word “YouTube” AND a word relating to the redesign, such as layout, style, interface, etc. We also added sentiment tagging to see how people generally felt about the redesign. We ran a filter for about 40 hours, and collected over 35,000 tweets from all over the world commenting about the YouTube UI update.
We found the “Haters” were wrong–a lot of people actually liked the design.
While one might have gotten the strong impression from online blogs of widespread public disappointment with the changes, a quick analysis of the tweets that the stream gathered over a 40 hour period told a different story. We found that there was actually a greater expression of positive rather than negative sentiment expressed by Twitter users in reference to the changes. 32.25% of the Tweets captured by our stream expressed positive sentiment, 57.26% of the tweets were neutral and only 29.30% expressed any negative sentiment. 29.30% is still high—but we wondered if there will always be a percentage of users who hate any new change to a UI.
The big surprise – most of the tweeting was being done by influential people!
Although the average Klout score of Twitter users is close to 10, we were fascinated to find out that 53.5% of the individuals tweeting within this stream had a Klout score of 26 or higher. This meant that not only was there a strong expression of positive sentiment but most of the tweets featured in the stream were also being written by highly influential Twitter users. It seems to us that YouTube must definitely be doing something really well if so many highly influential Twitter users were tweeting about the new UI.
What did we learn?
1. Twitter is a great place to get a complete picture of what users think about a new product.
If as YouTube say on their blog, they ‘rely on your feedback to figure out when we’ve gotten it right and when it needs further tweaks’, it’s important that it’s not just the views of a passionate minority of extreme YouTube lovers posting on the company blog, rather than the opinions of the greater YouTube user base, that drive forward future site developments and strategy.
2. The US is important, but so is the UK and Brazil!
The 37,385 tweets that DataSift collected deliver an objective image of the spread of public reaction immediately after launch. A broad data set such as this gives a reliable aggregate view of how people are responding online. This data can be be consumed though our API in real time and funneled through any application (CRM solution, dashboard etc.) or simply recorded and extracted as an excel file. It can also be analyzed by geographical region, gender, degrees of positive and negative sentiment and social influence level, url content as well as the trends within those streams. For instance one insight that we gleamed was that the tweets within this stream came mostly from the US but also the UK, and perhaps surprisingly Brazil.
3. DataSift is a great platform for mining Twitter content.
The DataSift platform is so easy to use were able to set up trackers in just a few minutes that were able to provide very insightful information. With all the noise that comes with the real-time web, extracting the information that will drive productive changes in your company’s communication with it’s customer base requires heavy duty technology. DataSift was architected for enterprises to manage the unstructured data of real-time social media with finesse so they get just the information they need to confidently derive effective strategy from the data.
4. For the daily price of a Starbucks Latte, YouTube could get really interesting insights into their users.
See the stream running live here. This stream costs $4.80 per day to run (not including licensing costs at 0.10 cents for 1000 tweets). Have a product launch coming soon? Set up your own stream on DataSift in less than a minute.
Did you miss our last Webinar, “Targets? Now you can watch the complete training session here!
Want the Slides of this Webinar? Just clik here
om/wp-content/2011/07/DataSift-Webinar4-sm.pdf
The fourth Training Module of DataSift, “Targets”, is scheduled for this Friday 22nd July, 14:00 BST.
DataSift takes data streams from the most popular social media sites. Targets are the individual elements of information these streams offer. There’s almost no limit to the filtering you can perform. Sign up for the webinar and learn to filter by language, follower count, keywords, geographical location.… You can even filter by the sentiment of posts, positive or negative!
Read the full list of concepts that we’ll cover and register
RIGHT HERE today!
DataSift Training Module 04: Targets
1. Introduction
2. Targets
3. Common Targets
4. Augmentation Targets
5. Summary
6. Q&A
Questions?
At the end of each Webinar you’ll have plenty of time to ask questions. However, if you would like to post your questions now and prepare us for the day, please post your questions in this thread.
Here you can watch the entire session of our Third Training Module, “Operators”, including a complete guide of all the possible Operators used in DataSift.
** Operators are functions within DataSift that form part of a Stream Definition. The Operator takes the value of the Target from the Input Object, runs its function against it with the specified Argument, and returns a result.
Want the Slides of this Webinar? Just clik here
Did you miss our Second Webinar, “Getting Started”? Here you can watch the complete session!
Don’t forget that our next Training Module, “Operators”, is scheduled on the next Friday 8 of July.
Want to attend? Get registered right here!
Want the Slides of this Webinar? Just clik here
The third Training Module of DataSift, “Operators”, is scheduled on the next Friday 8 of July.
In this new interactive webinar we will cover the following topics:
DataSift Training Module 03: “Operators”
1. Introduction to Operators
2. General Operators
2.1 contains
2.2 substr
2.3 contains_any
2.4 contains_near
2.5 exists
2.6 in
3. Comparative Operators
3.1 Less Than and Greater Than
3.2 Equals (==)
3.3 Not Equals (!=)
4. Regular Expressions
4.1 regex_partial
4.2 regex_exact
5. Geographical Operators
5.1 geo_radius
5.2 geo_polygon
6. Examples
7. Q&A
Click here and reserve your seat today, we really hope to see you there!
Best regards,
The DataSift Team
1. Introduction to Operators
2. General Operators
2.1 contains
Contains_word
Contains_phrase
Substr
2.2 contains_any
2.3 contains near
2.4 exists
2.5 In
3. Comparative Operators
3.1 Less than / Greater Than
3.2 Equals
3.3 Not equals
4. Regular expressions
4.1 regex exact
4.2 regex partial
5. Geo Operators
5.1 radius
5.2 polygon
5.3 box
6. Examples
7. Q&A
1. Introduction to Operators
2. General Operators
2.1 contains
2.2 substr
2.3 contains_any
2.4 contains_near
2.5 exists
2.6 in
3. Comparative Operators
3.1 Less Than and Greater Than
3.2 Equals (==)
3.3 Not Equals (!=)
4. Regular Expressions
4.1 regex_partial
4.2 regex_exact
5. Geographical Operators
5.1 geo_box
5.2 geo_radius
5.3 geo_polygon
6. Examples
7. Q&A
As you know DataSift is scheduling a series of training programs through webinars. Here you can watch the first one we did, “Basic Concepts”, introducing a general overview of the Platform.
Our second webinar, “Getting Started” is scheduled on the next Friday, 24th June 2011. The invitations are limited, so hurry up and reserve your seat today right here!
Want the Slides of this Webinar? Just clik here
The first module provided an overview to DataSift, in this second webinar we will try to cover the topics that will help you to start using DataSift.
It is scheduled on the next Friday, 24th June, 2011, just click here to register!
DataSift Training Module 02: Getting Started with DataSift
- Using the DataSift website
- Introduction to the Stream Definition
- Introduction to Filters
3.1 . Target
3.2. Operator
3.3. Argument
- Creating a Stream Definition
4.1. Step 1: Stream Creation
4.2. Step 2: Stream Editor
4.3. Step 3: Saving, Live Preview
- Embed a Stream
- Recordings
- Using de DataSift API
- HTTP Streaming and Websockets
- Restrictions
- Q&A
Hello DataSift Users,
DataSift is scheduling a series of training programs through webinars. The first one is scheduled on the Friday, 3rd June, 2011. You can book for the webinar by clicking here.
Basic Concepts Webinar
The first webinar will introduce the Basic Concepts of DataSift. The interactive session will cover the following topics:
- What is DataSift?
- Advantages of DataSift
- CSDL Overview
- Targets
- Operators
- Geo Operators
- Using DataSift website
- User profiles
- Licensing
- Pricing models
- How to use DataSift
- Examples
- Q&A
Slides for DataSift- Basic Concepts.
Future Webinars:
- Training Module 2: Getting Started with DataSift
- Training Module 3: Operators
- Training Module 4: Targets
- Training Module 5: Creating Advanced Rules (including Optimisation tips)
- Training Module 6 : DataSift APIs
- Training Module 7: Using DataSift Streaming Service (HTTP Streaming and Websockets)
- Training Module 8: Output formats
- Training Module 9: Pricing Models
- Training Module 10: Data Visualisation
We will update the blog with future webinar Dates soon. If you have any Questions regarding DataSift please post your Questions here, we will try to answer them in our Webinars.
Are you a developer who is currently investigating DataSift and our offerings, well if you are and you use Java and are after a library for our API then you might just find this little project on GitHub by Ollie Parsley of interest. It’s not a complete library at this point but it does mean that you can branch it and get involved with shaping how this library ends up! We’d like to get you the community involved in finishing it off and making it your own! It should give you the opportunity to get to grips with our API’s and services at the same time!
We did consider waiting until the library was complete before putting it out there but thought on this occasion that it might be interesting to see how you would like this library to be and what you would like to see added to it, i.e. get the conversation going around best practice with our libraries. Ollie will continue to work on it as well but we’d love to see some of you take the helm and show us what you want!
If you have created any source code that you feel others could use in their projects feel free to share your code on GitHub or similar and let us know! We’ll start adding the links to these into our documentation area for all to find nice and easily!
All our documentation can be found in our Knowledge Base!
Follow us on Twitter
Linkedin Group
Facebook