Tuesday 19 April 2016

What Twitter suggests for the New York primary

With Donald Trump's overwhelming dominance, there are no surprises on the Republican front. However, the remaining primary elections hold the answer to perhaps the most important question for the Democrats: Clinton or Sanders? According to Twitter, Sanders

In order to gain a better understanding of the possible outcomes of the upcoming, and highly critical, New York primary, our team at Diktio Labs took a different approach and left the polls behind. Instead, we monitored and analyzed activity on Twitter. 

Between April 11 and April 15, 2016, we analyzed 151,965 tweets by 36,703 accounts containing the hashtag #NYPrimary, with the purpose of identifying key influencers, topic clusters, and of course the popularity of candidates in the Empire State. 

#Trump2016 vs. #FeelTheBern

Despite the fact that Hillary Clinton is more widely considered to emerge victorious from the NY primary, and eventually become the candidate of the Democrats, Bernie Sanders and his supporters have a much stronger online presence. In fact, Sanders is the only candidate, thanks to his active supporters, who has a slight chance of diluting Trump's online dominance. 

Sanders supporters tweet vigorously, hence they represent over 50% of the Top 30 most active accounts. (We have manually removed bots.)
When it comes to influence however, results look slightly different. The Top 30 most retweeted accounts are in favor of Trump, but only with a mere 47%.

We categorized the most influential accounts by different dimensions of: well-connected, most mentioned, accounts with most outward activity and community brokers.

Well-connected accounts are those that receive the most attention in the NY primary conversations on Twitter from other accounts that have many followers. Trump’s supporters dominate this list. Noticeable are media outlets, such as NY1, CNN, POLITICO, and ABC News, and journalists, like Jeanine Ramirez covering stories around the primaries, who are often cited and followed by users interested in the primaries.

For most mentioned, there is only one account that makes it to the list for Cruz, four supporting Clinton, while the rest of the top 30 are Trump and Sanders supporters.

Most outward activity: accounts producing the most tweets in support for a candidate seem to be overwhelmingly pro-Sanders. However, most of them do not make it into the well-connected list because they are rather poorly embedded into Twitter conversations around the election.
    
Community brokers are accounts that bridge conversations about their preferred candidates between groups of users who would otherwise not communicate. They mostly engage in debated topics by following conversations in other camps and replying to those.  

In our analysis, we also examined the top 30 hashtags mentioned in order to gain a better understanding of the topics surrounding the New York primary.

Many hashtags are used to reference events or places. They are usually used in conjunction with candidate-related hashtags to mobilize followers to join rallies, follow ongoing or future events, and encourage voting.

Trump’s campaign-related hashtags receive the most attention, followed by Sanders. Clinton is referenced mostly through the hashtag #ImWithHer, rather than nominally. The supporters of Cruz mention their preferred candidate much less than the other supporters.

The hashtag #NeverTrump is considered the only negative tag in the Top 30.

In order to identify the top 30 most mentioned (interesting/debated/adored/hated) candidates, we took a look at candidate mentions, on a user level. Example: how many users talked about candidates, during the analyzed time frame. We have visualized our results on a network map. The size of nodes and labels indicates the number of users mentioning the name of the candidate, while the connecting lines (edges) reflect how many users talked about both candidates. The color of the node indicates party affiliations: red is for Republicans, blue is for Democrats.



The most mentioned candidate was Donald Trump with more than 2,000 more users talking about him than about Bernie Sanders. Kasich was the least mentioned candidate. Clinton and Cruz are mentioned almost by the same number of users, which is less than half the number of users mentioning Trump.

In terms of users talking about two candidates, the biggest overlap is between Clinton and Sanders, followed by Trump and Cruz. The difference is more than 1,000 users. The remaining combinations were not so frequent apart from that of Clinton and Trump, mentioned by two percent of the users using the hashtag #NYPrimary.



This interactive, clickable and zoomable network map, (filtered to indicate top connections only) depicts what hashtags were mentioned together within the same tweet in our dataset. The thicker the edge, the more often the two hashtags were mentioned together. Node and label sizes indicate how often the given hashtag was mentioned together with other hashtags [network science metric: weighted degree].

Over 19% of the tweets associated #NYPrimary with #Trump2016, and almost 16% with #FeelTheBern. #ImWithHer: 8.6% of tweets.  The different color clusters depict various topics around the NY Primary. Dark orange hashtags represent upcoming primaries: #PAPrimary, #MDPrimary, #DEPrimary, #CTPrimary, #RIPrimary, dark blue ones are the most associated hashtags with New York, while the light orange hashtags with the Democratic party. 

Will the domination on Twitter manifest in the elections?

So far, our analyses clearly show that Trump and Sanders dominate Twitter conversations about the NY primary, each in their own community of supporters and opponents. The NY primary are expected to have a higher than average turnout in the state of New York, which might bring surprises, at least for the Democrats, where, according to polls, the two candidates are in a tight race for the win.

Please bear in mind that an online analysis does not intend to replace the offline polls or in itself cannot predict the results of the actual elections. Our experience in political analysis suggests that smaller parties and “anti-establishment” candidates tend to be more active on social media. The NY primaries are further complicated by the fact that the registration was over six months ago, thus however successful a candidate is on social media now, it might be too late to turn the popularity gained into actual votes. Given the race is not over between the candidates, there is a lot to learn in the forthcoming months.

Are you interested in the methods behind our analysis, and how you could benefit from online community mapping? Reach out to us via email at info@diktiolabs.com

Friday 18 December 2015

What the numbers say - 2015 in the life of Maven7

2015 is slowly coming to an end, and while we are already fully focused on the future, let us reminisce about the year behind us. Maven7 has had an exciting year, packed with great challenges, great projects and even greater moments.


Strategically, 2015 was of key importance as the company received a set of Series A funding, making the total investment in Maven7 $2.3 million to date.

Team-wise, we have grown to 32 with the joining of 8 new mavens across our Development, Analyst, Sales and Marketing departments. With this expansion came an increase in our consumption as well. We have gulped over 11,000 liters of water, 10,300 cups of coffee and over 5,200 cups of tea. Oh and about 600 shakers of whey protein (gains gains gains!!!). Let's not talk about food, we eat a lot…especially when waiting for flights, all 56 of them this year.

We need to fuel ourselves though, this year we have passed the milestone of "220,000 work connections analyzed" with OrgMapper, and our Diktio Labs team was on a roll as well. They have analyzed over 20 million Facebook likes and 38 million Tweets to date. No wonder we need those 7,300 cups of coffee…

If you were to call us all at the same time, you could expect 8 iPhones and 24 Androids to ring, but call us before 7 P.M., otherwise we might be at an ice-hockey match or a pub quiz. Our analyst, Balázs attended 43 ice-hockey games this year and as far as our trivia-fondness goes, our quiz-enthusiasts answered over 2,000 questions (most of them correctly). We are a fun-loving bunch, but we also put great emphasis on supporting charities and other serious causes too, hence the heroes and heroines of the office donated 15 liters of blood this year.

All in all, 2015 was a challenging, but fun year in the life of Maven7 and we can hardly wait for the new year to come with everything it holds for us. 

Happy Holidays and see you in 2016!

Thursday 22 October 2015

What the change management community looks like on Twitter - mini research

Change Management has been amongst the top corporate priorities for some time now, yet it still poses serious challenges to even some of the most flexible and responsive organizations. For Change Management to be effective and successful, it is absolutely essential to identify the most influential members and change agents within an organization's internal stakeholder network. And that is exactly what we do with our cloud-based organizational diagnostic tool, OrgMapper.

This time, however, we wanted to see who these influential key players are online, thus we used Diktio Labs, our online community mapping suite, and conducted a mini research to identify whom the Twitter community considers Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) when it comes to the topic of change management, and the ideas that connect them.



How we did this

We monitored a specific set of keywords related to Change Management from September 14 to October 7, 2015,­ and mined over 17,000 tweets, tracking the activities of 9,054 users. The below image showcases the network of key hubs.



Each node (lilac dot) in the above network represents a Twitter account; the more interaction a user gets, the larger their node and label will be. For a better visual experience, the network is filtered to only depict edges (connections) that form amongst people who interacted with each other at least ten times. The thickness of the edges indicates the number of interactions between given users. Arrows indicate the direction of the interaction.


Key findings

Our analysis revealed a list of keywords most frequently used in conversations related to Change Management. On the below chart we filtered out the obvious "Change", "Management", "Organizational" and "#ChangeManagement" keywords in order to provide a more accurate picture of other relevant topics. The results demonstrated that innovation, culture and behavior are often mentioned together with Change Management.







A different approach to visualizing key topics related to Change Management.





Top Key Opinion Leaders in Change Management

In order to be considered a KOL in our mini research, users had to have more than 500 followers, and at least 10 tweets and over 10 incoming interactions during the analyzed time period. To calculate and determine the rankings of Key Opinion Leaders, we have taken into account their:

  • number of incoming replies, mentions and retweets
  • number of followers
  • number of tweets


Based on our analysis, the final list of KOLs in the topic of Change Management is as follows:

  1. @mikelehroza
  2. @brunogebarski
  3. @jasonlittle
  4. @aharrell2000
  5. @consultparagon
  6. @innovate
  7. @bizlibrary
  8. @brainzooming
  9. @malati_shinazy
  10. @ms_mac4

As you can see, being an online influencer is not solely about the number of followers a user may have. Our top list includes Twitter accounts with as few as 820 followers all the way to 61,000.





Why influencer marketing is important

Great marketers know and engage their target audience's key influencers. Conducting an online community mapping analysis enables you to identify key opinion leaders who are really capable of getting through to the audience you want to engage, and the main topics that trigger and drive them. Value-driven influencer engagement will not only help strengthen your KOLs advocacy, but also prompt them to get involved in your communication campaigns.


For more information on online influencer identification, contact us at info@diktiolabs.com. 

Tuesday 30 June 2015

Maven7 Welcomes New Director for Its OrgMapper Business Line

It is our pleasure to announce the appointment of Hiske den Boer as Director of our OrgMapper business line. Hiske is joining us to oversee service delivery, as well as business- and product development related to organizational network analysis. 

"With our recent round of funding we felt the time was just right to appoint a strategic leader who can help us take advantage of the tremendous opportunities in the marketplace, and bring new insights into our operations." – said András Vicsek, Maven7's co-founder and head of research. "We are delighted Hiske accepted our invitation."

"I have been working with Maven7 part-time since last year as a senior business consultant" - commented Hiske, "mostly assisting clients in understanding what benefits organizational network analysis can provide for their organizations. Now I'm looking forward to diving in deeper and making a real impact on business objectives, whilst also growing our team of OrgMapper experts."

Over the past 17 years Hiske has worked for multiple management consulting firms, including Accenture and PricewaterhouseCoopers, leading numerous large-scale HR projects, and is now ready to take OrgMapper forward and further expand its global reach and capabilities.


We are collectively really excited to work with her, and about the new energies, ideas, and skills she brings to the whole Maven7 team.

Welcome on board, Hiske! :)

Monday 8 June 2015

Maven7 Raises a Total of $2.3M to Bring Network Science to Commercial, Mass Audience



June 8, 2015, Boston, MA - Budapest, Hungary

Maven7, a leading player in network science-based business analytics, has raised over $1.5 million in 'Series A' funding led by venture capital management firm, Perion. The funding is earmarked for market expansion and the further development of Maven7’s business analytical tools.

"With this investment round, the international sales of our already successful solutions receives yet another boost. After a successful US and Latin American market entry, we are working on acquiring further customers, entering new markets, and introducing new products." said Peter Ruppert, CEO and co-founder of Maven7. "We are proud to have Perion on board, and are excited to move forward with the resources to help make our vision a reality. Our focus is to put more and more powerful tools into the hands of our customers, with which they can quickly and profoundly understand how the complex networks most important to them operate, and thus gain concrete financial benefits." added András Vicsek, co-founder and head of research.

Perion led this round of funding because it believes in Maven7's dynamic growth, and that the startup has a continued potential to become a multi-million dollar company. "We invested in Maven7 for its strength in leveraging and expanding the latest findings in network science, its proven ability to provide immediate business benefits. I am intrigued by what I have seen so far; Maven7 is in a very exciting space, bridging the ideas of enterprise intelligence, big data and social analytics, and can't wait to see how far it will go." explained Gábor Vitán, CEO of Perion.

Maven7 empowers strategic leaders to make better-informed decisions by introducing network science into the business planning process. Via its two distinct product suites, OrgMapper and Diktio Labs, Maven7 provides organizational network analysis to HR practitioners, online community and influencer mapping solutions to marketing professionals, and big data analytics.

Among its co-founders are some of the biggest names in network science, including award winning scientists, Albert-László Barabási and Tamás Vicsek, through whom the Budapest and Boston-based startup also has very close working relations with the prime academic think tanks of the discipline.

Maven7 opened its first overseas office in Boston last year, and already has a prominent presence on the European, Latin American and US markets.

Maven7 raised more than $750,000 from Primus Capital in seed in 2014, putting the current total investment at over $2.3M.



About Perion
Perion is a member of Hungarian Venturio Group, with funds supported by the European investment fund initiative, JEREMIE. Perion aims to invest $16 million in promising Hungarian ventures during its investment phase ending in 2015. With the IT sector being one of its main focus areas, Maven7 is the 4th investment on the venture capital management company's portfolio.

About Maven7
Maven7 supports business decisions by transforming large amounts of hard-to-interpret data into actionable business intelligence. Based on the methodologies of network analysis and data mining, Maven7 has developed its own proprietary network mapping tools, including OrgMapper and Diktio Labs, to conduct analyses in organizational development, social media, the pharmaceutical/medical industries and many other fields.

About Diktio Labs
Diktio Labs takes marketing to a whole new level of targeting and efficiency by enabling organizations to know exactly who will prove receptive, influential and responsive to their messaging prior to a campaign launch. Diktio Labs works directly with end-user clients and also partners with a number of marketing advisors, consultancies and agencies to deliver its technology into a fully integrated campaign.

About OrgMapper
OrgMapper is an easy-to-use cloud-based software application developed to gather, measure and visualize organizational interrelations. Via organizational network analysis (ONA), it maps the human side of organizational processes; it reveals hidden informal employee networks, exposes critical connections, departmental and hierarchical links, uncovers the barriers to information flow, and identifies key individuals who connect departments and products, or are influential to their colleagues.

About Primus Capital
The Primus-managed Venture Capital Fund was launched in 2010 with $28M of core capital. It currently has 14 companies on its portfolio, all of which are built on innovative technologies and sell to international markets. Through the Primus-provided funding and expertise, Maven7 achieved a significant increase in value recently.



Media contacts:

Dávid Kálmán Zsuzsanna Blau
Senior Analyst, Perion Head of Marketing and Communications, Maven7
Phone: +36 20 239 0914 Phone: +36 30 210 4830
Email: kalmand@perion.hu Email: zsuzsanna.blau@maven7.com

Friday 27 March 2015

How the HR Tech Europe conference went down on Twitter

HR Tech Europe, the self-proclaimed fastest growing HR event in Europe, took place on March 24-25 in London. The conference drew HR practitioners from far and wide to discover the latest trends in HR technology. Although we could not be there in body to showcase our cloud-based organizational diagnostic tool, OrgMapper, we wanted to show some spirit and decided to map the social activity around the event.



How we did this:

In order to map the structure of the online community around the conference, we tracked Twitter with our online community mapping suite, Diktio Labs, between 6 am, March 18, 2015 and 11:50 pm March 26, 2015, and looked into the network of all relevant interactions. We downloaded 11,013 tweets containing the hashtag #HRTechEurope.

Each node (blue dot) in the below network represents a Twitter account; the more influential a user is, the darker and larger its node will be. For a better visual experience, the network is filtered to only depict edges (connections) that form amongst people who retweeted each other at least three times. The thickness of the edges indicates the number of retweets; meaning, the thicker the edge, the more often a user retweeted another user. Arrows indicate the direction of the retweet: the head of the arrow points at the retweeted user.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrBuhOjvLlaQ4vzTH4xHRoeGp1WCYRcM1nu4gnapaVR8Qm2D24Z7ATkFVB-2Vzqs8KDt3eh-elB7zJrr6RuHvE7kd1vVOJumyhxW8uawYPWAtnw42f2FAluaJ0q6W0QKYWeX0OlUNeQYYB/s1600/HRTech_retweet_network_min3interactions.png


Our key findings:

@hrzone was the most retweeted user with 493 retweets, followed by @oraclehcm, @let_anita, @david_green_uk, @mervyndinnen, and @rohitbhosale. The network is well-connected, though @rohitbhosale and @emee_insights form almost a separate cluster but still connected via @violazoldy.




We also took a peek at the most trending hashtags, but excluded #HRTechEurope (which was used extensively throughout this period). We found that #HR was the most widely used hashtag, with 605 mentions within the community, followed by the hashtags #ngarh and #Gamification.





In 2015 online influencers can make or break a brand. Instead of concentrating on HOW MANY people are talking about your business, focus on WHO is in the middle of these discussions. Great marketers know and engage their social media influencers. Building close relationships with your influencers will not only help strengthen their advocacy, but also convince them to get involved in your communication campaigns.

For more information on online influencer identification, contact us at info@diktiolabs.com.

Wednesday 16 July 2014

Maven7 Introduces Dedicated Brand for Community and Influencer Mapping

Diktio Labs aims to transform the marketing sector by bringing network science to the fingertips of all marketing professionals


Maven Seven Inc. (Maven7), one of the world's leading network research and data mining companies, has announced the introduction of Diktio Labs™, its new suite of online community and influencer mapping solutions.

Developed to empower marketing professionals by integrating network science into the campaign planning process, Diktio Labs is set to transform the digital marketing sector. For the first time, any proactive informational outreach campaign will have at its disposal a range of innovative and cost-effective planning tools driven by powerful network science.

Diktio Labs' data-driven approach stands in stark contrast to commonly used volume-based monitoring tools and methods. Traditional tools track campaign outputs, monitoring sentiment, conversations, trends and behavior. By contrast, Diktio Labs aims to map networks, hidden structures, relationships and both individual and group behavior across a range of client-specific criteria (issues, behavior, beliefs, preferences, patterns, etc.). Its algorithms and scrapers are tailor-made to each campaign, offering insight and intelligence to a level never before possible.

"Modern companies have to understand better how their customers seek out information online," said Chris Dobson, a seasoned communications agency manager who is driving Diktio Labs' to-market strategy.

"A huge amount of money is wasted through trial and error within digital and, indeed, traditional marketing, mostly completely unnecessarily. We now have the technology to identify communities of interest by a myriad of criteria and help transform any outreach campaign, be it political-, marketing- or social-based, in terms of insight and accuracy. Anyone in these areas not embracing network science now will soon be left behind."

A co-founder of Maven7 is the globally-acclaimed pioneer of network theory, Albert-László Barabási, based at Northeastern University in Boston. He also believes that the time has come for all marketing to take full advantage of network science: "We are constantly surrounded by hopelessly complex systems, from our society to computers and cell phones, to even the networks of the billions of neurons in our brains. These systems, although random looking at first, display endless signatures of order and self-organization, which can be understood, quantified, predicted, and eventually controlled. Show me a marketer that wouldn't want to take advantage of these advances to exploit that information."

Diktio Labs' products are available in almost all languages, and have already been used across over 15 countries, as diverse as Columbia, China, Mexico, Russia, Hungary, the UK and the US. Tailor-made algorithms specific to each client and project guarantee accuracy and relevance levels far beyond 'off the shelf' models.





About Maven7 
Maven7 supports business decisions by transforming large amounts of hard-to-interpret data into actionable business intelligence. Based on the methodologies of network analysis and data mining, Maven7 has developed its own proprietary network mapping tools to conduct analyses in organizational development, social media, the pharmaceutical/medical industries and many other fields.

About Diktio Labs 
Diktio Labs takes marketing to a whole new level of targeting and efficiency by enabling organizations to know exactly who will prove receptive, influential and responsive to their messaging prior to a campaign launch. Diktio Labs works directly with end-user clients and also partners with a number of marketing advisors and agencies to deliver its technology into a fully integrated campaign.