Full essay

Twitter: Taming the firehose
Andria Krewson
Akrewson45c@mac.com
Certificate in Technology and Communication program,
School of Journalism and Mass Communication,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
May 3, 2009

About the Author
Andria Krewson, a journalist with more than 25 years of news experience in Georgia, Florida and primarily North Carolina, is a student in the Certificate in Technology and Communications program in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In her journalism career, she has focused on design; learning, teaching and supporting new technologies, especially content management systems; producing local, focused information in niche publications; and managing creative workers. She has been on Twitter as the user @underoak since February 2008, and also as @akrewson since September 2008. She expects to complete the UNC technology program in May 2009. Reach her at akrewson45c@mac.com

UNC Honor Code: "I have neither given nor received unauthorized assistance while preparing this assignment and I have written the code myself."

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit here. Brief abstract
Twitter, the short-message service started in March 2006, has a reputation for being filled with irrelevant noise. But new users continue to stream onto the service, particularly since the talk-show host Oprah joined in March 2009. The service is used by a chat room for some and as a wire service for others, bringing access to the sharing and reading of breaking news to anyone with an Internet connection.
With increased volume comes increased noise and competition for scarce attention. To be heard, news organizations need to use the service strategically.
Based on reviews of available online resources focusing on technology and marketing, plus snapshots and study of data available from within Twitter and from others studying Twitter, this paper focuses on potential ways that traditional media companies can adapt and use the service well. By focusing on the natural Twitter news cycle and using filtering and data-mining techniques, media companies can refine and protect their brands.
Introduction
Twitter, the short-message service started in March 2006, has exploded in popularity and media buzz in the past few months, adding greatly to the volume of raw information and noise available to anyone with an Internet connection or a web-enabled phone.
In March 2009, The Nielsen rating service released numbers that indicated Twitter grew 1,382 percent year-over-year in February, registering more than 7 million unique visitors in the United States for the month (Ostrow, Mashable).
At the same time, journalists were moving quickly to Twitter. A website, Muckrack, began compiling tweets from specific journalists on Twitter, and the site includes a source list that shows the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, ABC News, the BBC, Business Week, Forbes, Fortune and many others.
PR Week, in its Media Survey 2009, noted that 22% of journalists were on Twitter.
Media companies have been moving to Twitter in an effort to increase their traffic on their own web sites, sending headlines and links. In addition, people have moved to Twitter because it’s a simple way to share news, and it’s a smart place to claim one’s brand before someone else does.
Then Oprah, the popular U.S. day-time talk show host, arrived on Twitter on April 16, 2009, and traffic and new signups increased in four days by between 500,000 and 1.5 million (Schonfeld, Techcrunch). To give that number context, TechCrunch estimated Twitter users at one million one year before Oprah created her account.
Thesis
All the new traffic brings us to a new phase for Twitter. Traditional and new media organizations will need to analyze and adjust to a quickly changing landscape filling with competitors. Many how-to guides to Twitter have been circulated, and some traditional news organizations have devoted resources to Twitter. But as the size of the network explodes, so does its nature.
From Jeremiah Owyang, in Web Strategy, April 19, 2009:

“This increase in people, and brands of all sorts joining Twitter will cause more noise and content to be created. We haven’t even seen the half of it, as devices like your car, laptop, can start auto-emitting signals that could become tweets. As a result, expect more filtering tools and analysis by humans to matter more and more.”

This paper cannot cover all Twitter add-on tools, or all the implications of the explosion of Twitter, and it will aim to avoid repetition with the myriad tip sheets and advice available elsewhere, yet still give a sampling of those tips.
This paper focuses on this thesis: News organizations can use the new, crowded Twitter better by focusing on the natural news cycle and listening and filtering effectively. Background and history
Twitter, an online message service that limits posts to 140 characters, began in 2006, created by Obvious Corp., run by Evan Williams and Biz Stone. It received little mainstream attention until 2007. The Wall Street Journal wrote about the service in March of that year, and in April, Fred Stutzman, now a University of North Carolina doctoral student in Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science, wrote a post called “The 12-Minute Definitive Guide to Twitter" on the AOL Developer Network, calling it an online open chat room. The service began to get more mainstream attention after the Los Angeles Fire Department made use of the message network in October 2007 during the California wildfires crisis.
The service continued to grow throughout 2008, playing a role as information source in the U.S. election. In July 2008, the company bought an add-on application, Summize, a tool that allowed advanced searching of tweets. (CNET)
By winter and spring of 2009, Twitter began to get frequent mention in the mainstream media. Almost all major U.S. newspapers claimed their spot on the service. (Muckrack)
Add-on software bloomed, to shorten links or to manage and filter large groups of users and content. News managers and employees shared their ideas on how to use the system as well, mainly to broadcast news links, as the industry searched for business solutions and higher readership.
Literature and resources
Because Twitter and the related programs that people use to access its information are relatively new, objective information and quantitative measurements are difficult to find, though many words online have been focused on Twitter.
Much of the new information aimed at journalists focuses on “how-to” steps rather than analysis of Twitter, its timeline and how to filter it to manage reputation, find competitors and build community. In contrast, marketers and public-relations experts have focused on brand management, or its lack. And services that analyze specific content and volume of Twitter, related to its news cycle, are generally brand new.
As an example of how-to information, O’Reilly Media has produced a book, The Twitter Book, written by Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein. The format of the book is built on a Powerpoint model, in print. (O’Reilly Media.)
For journalists in particular, many how-to guides exist, frequently based on personal successes and failures and sometimes using techniques for community building that resemble marketers’ methods.
Here’s a short list of articles or posts about how journalists can use Twitter:
• “All the News That's Fit to Tweet,” White, Laurie, August/September 2008, American Journalism Review http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=4601
• “Networking News,” Emmett, Arielle, December/January 2009, American Journalism Review
• “Quick Tweets About Twitter’s Usefulness," Buttry, Steve, April 28, 2009, Transforming the Gaz
• “Colonel Tribune: Chicago’s Unlikely Social Media Pioneer,” Foster, Stuart, April 23, 2009

Meanwhile, one analyst for Forrester Research, a technology and market research company, writes often about Twitter at his site, Web Strategy. The analyst, Jeremiah Owyang, states on his site that he joined Twitter in December 2006, so he writes as a user as well as an analyst. He focuses on the business of social networks and how consumers are using social tools to change the relationship with companies. And he tells stories of what happens when companies don’t change.
In December 2007, he posted on Web Strategy an article, “Some Conversations Have Shifted To Twitter,” and he received 611 responses to the post.
“If you’re in the tech industry, and in marketing, you should be paying attention to what’s happening on twitter. There’s even search tools that can help you find discussions and memes. Also, if you’re trying to reach early adopters, these are tools for you,” he wrote.
Owyang also noted in the post that Twitter was driving traffic to his blog, with more than 2,000 referrals to his posts in the 30-day prior period.
Others have also focused on the marketing and community management in a world where power has shifted to the buyers, and marketing case studies have arisen for public-relations issues for companies and products such as Motrin, Skittles and Exxon Mobil. Those case studies can add value for news organizations in marketing and protecting their brands. The cases show how marketing and public-relations responses need to be quick on Twitter because of its fast news cycle, and they show how filtering Twitter information to find consumer reactions is an important tool that businesses can use to their advantage.

Here’s a short list of articles or posts about public-relations missteps and Twitter reactions:
• “How “Janet” Fooled the Twittersphere (and me) She’s the Voice of Exxon Mobil” Owyang, Jeremiah, Aug. 1, 2008
• “Motrin moms," a-Twitter over ad, take on Big Pharma--And win” Matson, John. Nov. 17, 2008
• “When Skittles Met Twitter” Capell, Kerry. Business Week, March 8, 2009.

For volume and content measurement, many of the same sources that measure web site visits, like Nielsen Online and comScore, also measure Twitter usage, but some critics say those measurements only count visits to Twitter’s main website and overlook the many other software options used to read Twitter information (Schonfeld, TechCrunch).
Some also say numbers of new accounts are misleading when many new users do not return to the site one month later (Advertising Age).
In relation to a Twitter news cycle, some clues are emerging, not just in volume of tweets but also in content. The sources of some of the most-specific information come from new websites, not from established companies.
The web site TweetRush.com (@tweetrush) displays visual representations of the quantity of tweets, with numbers kept for the preceding seven days. In addition, the site displays the volume of tweets per hour, based on Coordinated Universal Time (essentially the same as Greenwich Mean Time).
Generally, the site shows highest usage of Twitter during the hours that European work hours overlap U.S. work hours. According to the TweetRush statistics, hourly usage between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. EST, overlapping the European work hours of 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. GMT, is about 67,000 tweets. For comparison, hourly usage during the East Coast sleeping hours of midnight to 4 a.m. EST, or 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. GMT, is 48,000 to 50,000. (TweetRush)
Beyond volume, content matters greatly for news cycles as well. For a quantitative source to illustrate this idea, the website Charlotte Tweets (@cltweets), and the automated tweet message about keywords, from Blair Trosper, give some clues.
Trosper has set up a program that counts the heaviest users of Twitter in the Charlotte area, and it also analyzes the content of the tweets, looking for uncommon keywords. Trosper is continuing to refine his program to throw out common words that lack meaning, such as connecting words like ”around”, “the”, “consisting” and days of the week. He also throws out d the 5,000 most-common words in the English language (Trosper, Charlotte Tweets and tweets from @cltweets).
For the time period of April 24 through April 27, 2009, I recorded the words Trosper identified as the most-used topics through his postings from the @cltweets account. Trosper’s program sends out tweets every three hours, but the topic words are identified for the preceding six-hour time period, to show changes and trends over time. The time period selected includes a Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, to compare how content focus changes on weekends.
Remember, when looking at the keywords in the chart, they cover the previous six-hour period, so when you see the word “breakfast” included at 3:15 p.m., it’s a most-used topic between 9:15 a.m. and 3:15 p.m. Note also the emergence of swine flu.

Friday, April 24, 2009
12:15 a.m. weather, beach, myrtle, band, drinking
3:15 a.m. band, beach, weather, drinking, beer
6:15 a.m. goodnight, bout, beach, now im, going to bed
9:15 a.m. goodnight, bout, internet, awake, beach
12:15 p.m. good morning, breakfast, tgif, weather, beach
3:15 p.m. good morning, weather, tgif, breakfast, tiger woods
6:15 p.m. next week, weather, tiger woods, beach, facebook
9:15 p.m. weather, next week, nap, beach, facebook

Saturday, April 25, 2009
12:15 a.m. traffic, weather, dmb, beach, dave
3:15 a.m. beer, dmb, traffic, weather, dave
6:15 a.m. drunk, beer, obsessed, random, goodnight
9:15 a.m. goodnight, beer, cats, club, drunk
12:15 p.m. good morning, weather, park, awake, sunny
3:15 p.m. good morning, park, weather, draft, breakfast
6:15 p.m. weather, park, draft, beer, wedding
9:15 p.m. bea, draft, park, weather, arthur

Sunday, April 26, 2009
12:15 a.m. bea, arthur, draft, nfl draft, park
3:15 a.m. bea, panthers, church, bout, draft
6:15 a.m. bout, panthers, club, lakers, church
9:15 a.m. awake, club, singing, bea, goodnight
12:15 p.m. good morning, church, weather, awake, swine flu
3:15 p.m. church, swine flu, pool, breakfast, beach
6:15 p.m. swine flu, church, weather, nap, bulls
9:15 p.m. swine flu, weather, beach, nap, draft

Monday, April 27, 2009
12:15 a.m. swine flu, church, weather, draft, goodnight
3:15 a.m. swine flu, going to bed, goodnight, church, bout
6:15 a.m. going to bed, swine flu, album, now im, goodnight
9:15 a.m. good morning, swine flu, weather, breakfast, mondays
12:15 p.m. swine flu, good morning, weather, breakfast, flu
3:15 p.m. swine flu, flu, weather, mexico, google
6:15 p.m. Swine flu, flu, weather, mexico, nap
9:15 p.m. Swine flu, flu, weather, facebook, chuck
Analysis
As a news medium, Twitter is still relatively new. While many new books are in the works or just published, the messaging service has yet to be intensively studied for how it can be most effective for news organizations.
Part of the difficulty of analysis relates directly to its growth rate and, likely, changing demographics.
Journalists can find plenty of help in figuring how other news organizations have used Twitter by reading how-to posts and articles, but determining when and how much to tweet for maximum effect has yet to be quantified in a large scale.
And while marketers and public-relations people like Jeremiah Owyang and Laura “Pistachio” Fitton have studied the effect of Twitter on bottom-up consumer campaigns, that information does not generally get addressed in traditional newsrooms.
Certainly searching for competitive marketing data has not been a newsroom function. However, such searching, using basic search tools available from within Twitter, can provide useful information about competitors. And in this new technology world, the line between competitors and sources can blur, as companies take marketing campaigns directly to customers, cutting out intermediary advertising or news disseminators.
Knowing who is entering the new information marketplace through data filtering of Twitter is important information for marketers and newsroom employees of traditional news organizations, because it can broaden sources for the newsroom and it can demonstrate new potential areas for advertising and marketing.
Also, smart searching and the encouraging of audiences to help report are new tools that some newsrooms are just beginning to embrace.
In October 2008, the Southeastern United States faced a gas shortage and price gouging. Residents in the Atlanta area began using Twitter to post locations and prices of available gas, marking their tweets with a hashtag to enable findability.
At one point, the tag #atlgas became the fourth-highest used hashtag on Twitter. The person credited with the idea was a marketing consultant. (Nouraee, Creative Loafing.) The Atlanta Journal Constitution added a widget to its website displaying the live tweets coded with the tag. The news organization has since used the same technique with other big news events, as has The Charlotte Observer.
Those examples show the power of filtering, and they also point to the power of understanding the news cycle on Twitter.
The news cycles of newspapers, radio and television have had decades to arrive at identifiable times where news was likely to be shared. Even the web staffs of traditional media outlets have identified a news cycle, with visitors coming to web pages heavily in the early weekdays mornings, at traditional weekday lunch hours and before leaving work. The websites allow news organizations to compete in breaking news, and much focus has been put on being timely and quick in the past.
Still, many traditional news organizations use automated “dumping” of links into Twitter after print publications are finished and stories have been sent to the web.
The Chicago Tribune and The Orange County Register are exceptions. The news organizations have several Twitter accounts for various kinds of news, and then they add human elements: @coloneltribune in Chicago and @ocreggie in Orange County. The accounts, particularly@coloneltribune, interact with followers and respond in breaking news situations (Foster, Mashable).
In addition to specific role models, some clues for understanding a Twitter news cycle exist.
A quick snapshot on Monday, April 27, 2009, of the keywords from Charlotte Tweets does not show that tweets deal with specific work-related issues. Rather, the topics appear to focus on the biggest news story in April 2009, swine flu, as well as common chat words one might use with a co-worker in the hall.
However, a comparison of those topics to a Saturday shows a striking difference. “Beer” was a most-used topic word for four different time periods on Saturday, and “drinking” was a most-used topic word in two time periods that covered late-night Thursday night. “Church” was a most-used topic word in five time periods on Sunday.
That information could be used to help editors select appropriate times to send out tweets pointing to stories about religion, or stories about entertainment and bars. Solutions
Many sources exist for teaching journalists how to tweet. The suggested solutions here focus on how news organizations can use some other, less-discussed facets such as the news cycle and data mining of Twitter.
• Build a community of followers by using search tools for local users of Twitter. (Data mining and filtering.)
• Provide that community with solid, direct, deep-linked articles, edited and timed to match their interests. (News cycle.)
• Seek out or fund further research into the news cycle of Twitter, particularly in terms of content. (Data mining and filtering.)
• Use efficient tools like TweetDeck and search to discover what local Twitter users are saying to determine the character of a geographic community.(Data mining.)
• Ask the network for help only after having established a presence. Encourage community use simple tools like hashtags to make information findable. (Data mining and filtering.)
• Listen to Twitter users by using search tools to protect the news organization’s brand. Respond promptly to any criticisms sent out on Twitter. (Data mining and filtering.)

Conclusion
News organizations and employees still have much to learn about how to use the relatively young messaging tool, Twitter. The size and nature of the network changed dramatically in the spring of 2009, and those changes come so quickly that it’s difficult for news organizations to form strategies for the tool.
While some news organizations have dived into the service, posting and soliciting information, many news organizations still seem to be using Twitter as only a broadcasting tool, which ignores at least half of its value.
Listening and searching for information in Twitter, despite the high volume of noise, bring value for reporting in information, and value for marketing in terms of finding what competitors and consumers exist and what content they are posting.
Understanding the need for speed and the natural news cycle can also help media organizations make decisions about whether to compete in breaking news, how to compete in breaking news, who competitors might be and what techniques they use, and how users read and post to Twitter to reflect the natural cycle of their own lives.
In addition, listening and reading allow news organizations to watch how the network changes in terms of membership demographics, size and social dynamics, allowing quick responses and adjustments in strategy to a changing world.
Wise words were said by @ColonelTribune, otherwise known as Daniel Honigman:
“Don’t worry about reinventing the wheel, but keep your ear close enough to the ground so that you’re not late to the party, when something new does go on.” (Foster, Mashable)

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