Link to original article

Fredericton firm connects Twitter live to television

When rapper Kanye West snatched the microphone from country singer Taylor Swift during the MTV Video Music Awards Sunday night, online social media bloggers went wild.

Within seconds Twitter users chimed in with their views on the rapper's stunt, often full of vulgar language, and West became among the most blogged-about personalities affiliated with the TV company's awards.

A tool developed by Fredericton's Radian6 and San Francisco design firm Stamen - with the support of Twitter - allowed MTV to track live online feedback of its broadcast and continue monitoring the feelings of the Internet after the event.

According to Chris Ramsey, vice-president of business development for Radian6, the clickable image of West on the live website quickly became front and centre of the page.

"Kanye West got pretty big," Ramsey said.

During Sunday evening's ceremony, West appeared on stage as Swift was accepting her moonman trophy for winning best female video and publicly spelled out his disdain, suggesting Beyoncé's Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It) - "one of the best videos of all time" to him - should have won.

Just moments after the outburst, the site produced by Radian6 and Stamen allowed Internet surfers and MTV corporate types alike to see West's image, surrounded by the images of other celebrities, and read the number of Twitter messages and the most commonly used words to describe the rap star's showing.

"Some of them aren't very nice," Ramsey said of the popular keywords initially associated with West just after 9:30 p.m., which included "Swift,-Taylor,-VMAs" and vitriolic words inappropriate for print.

Even by Monday afternoon - long after the awards had finished - West was still the most prominent on MTV's so-called Tweet Tracker at www.mtv.com, with more than 4,700 recent tweets about the rapper registered around 5 p.m.

Along the bottom of the site, users can scroll a timeline to see how many Twitter messages associated with the awards were posted and when and who were the popular faces at any given time.

Ramsey wouldn't say how much the deal with Stamen, MTV and Twitter was worth for his firm, which specializes in tracking how corporations' brands perform on the web.

For MTV, Radian6 used a tailored version of its Internet social web crawler, which allows the company to "hear what people are saying" online - according to Ramsey - with a customized visualization interface produced by Stamen layered on top.

The firms needed the help of Twitter to handle what Ramsey called a "monstrous" amount of data associated with the video music awards Sunday night.

"Every Twitter trend was from the VMAs last night," Ramsey said Monday, speaking about topics hot on the social media site at any given moment. "It was either VMAs or the name of a celebrity."

The executive said the partnership represents an industry first. The live site is the only time any company has monitored the response of the users of Twitter - increasingly being tapped to assess the pulse of the Internet - to a TV broadcast, he said.

"This is definitely blazing a new path into the integration with Twitter live to TV.

"I would fully expect that this would become more mainstream."