Practical Text Mining and Statistical Analysis for Non-structured Text Data Applications

Tutorial y

Case Study

Predicting Exposure of Social Messages: The Bin Laden Live Tweeter

Tom Emerson,     Senior Research Scientist, Topsy Labs

Rishab Ghosh,     Cofounder and Vice President of Research, Topsy Labs

Eddie Smith,     CRO, Topsy Labs

Contents

Introduction

Analysis

Summary

Introduction

On April 30, 2011, at 7:08 PM, Sohaib Athar, an IT consultant residing in Abbottabad, Pakistan, tweeted, “Since taliban (probably) don’t have helicopters”, and since they’re saying it was not ‘ours,’ so must be a complicated situation.” Over the next 30 hours, Sohaib’s tweets, under the Twitter handle @ReallyVirtual, were exposed over 82 million times to people around the globe.

Social media has shown in multiple instances the power a single person’s ...