As the world becomes more connected, everyone wants to share their thoughts on major events. Whether it's a big sporting event, a natural disaster, or a political debate, the stream of information present in the Twitter-verse is staggering.
According to Mashable, last night's presidential debate generated 10.3 million tweets over the 90 minute event. Things started out relatively quiet, producing less than 25,000 tweets per minute over the first half hour of the debate. After that, the tweets per minute skyrocketed, topping out at nearly 158,000 tweets per minute at 9:53 eastern time. The total number of tweets set a new record for a political event, although we suspect that the record will be short lived given the constant expansion of social media.
So what can be done with this data? Using data analytics (with products such as Oracle's Exalytics appliance) on this "big data" can yield all manner of information that can be useful to both campaigns. For example, the candidates could mine the data to find what the sentiment is for a certain candidate by people in a certain state, county, or even city. This information can be used to help figure out where to spend campaign resources to help sway the elections, and we'd be shocked if data scientists weren't already pouring over the data to identify next moves for the each of the candidates.
Source: Mashable | Image Courtesy of Mashable
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