Data & Stuff

In Birmingham, we are fortunate enough to have a variety of nice coffee places. Such as Hudsons, Saint Caffe and Urban Coffee. The later is one of the more sociable companies I’ve come across.

Sociable, in the sense of user engagement and interaction.

From a historic perspective, I was only aware of them as they had followed me on Twitter – before they had actually opened the shop. The fact that they were to be located around the corner from my office made me interested, and I awaited their coffee and also how they would use their Twitter account.

What I’ve spotted @UrbanCoffeeCo get upto:

-When people ask where they are – they respond back with directions, and even a map now and again.
-When someone got a new job – they were congratuated.
-If people visit, they ask how it was

Through my circle of friends, I’ve only heard good things about it, but with the internet and their twitter account so have a lot of other people. The fact that people can say “I’m off to @urbancoffee” can lead to interest in their followers.

They also seem to ‘get’ how they can use twitter:

I can’t quite remember exactly when they opened, but you can see a consistant tweeting effort by the company, that said, when I’m on holiday in Oct they did go a bit quiet

Now their target market is going to be the people in and around the Colmore Business area, or living in the locale. Which ties in with the tweeting occurring mainly in and around their hours, and key ‘peak’ times – like lunches and late afternoons on the weekends.

Yet it’s not all one way traffic, the brand respond, and also alert followers to things of interest. Whether it be the latest filter on, the soup of the day etc:

What it shows is that by simply engaging with your users, and they will engage back.

Lately they are offering whoever is Mayor of the coffee shop a free coffee once a week. Which is encouraging people to ‘check in’ with Foursquare, and when they do – their friends know exactly where they are – helping spread the word about the coffee shop, and of course you can only be mayor by visiting the most in the last 60 days. . . so a lot of coffee will end up being drunk.

They are encouraging people to use Foursquare, and it will be interesting to see how other Birmingham Businesses start to use Foursquare, and whether they have similiar customer interactions.

What are your experiences of Urban Coffee Co, and other businesses that have a web presence?

Visualisations from:
Tweet Reach
Tweet Stats
Twitter Stream Graphs –May appear, server unresponsive.
Tweet Paste

Last weekend (24-26th July), was the Supersonic Festival at the Custard Factory.

Pete Ashton, was ‘in charge’ of the twitter account @supersonicfest – this was used over the weekend to interact with the festival goers.  As well as the account, the hashtag #supersonic was used.

Over on ash10.com Pete has conducted some preliminary analysis, focussing on the numbers and proportion of tweets sent, which contained one of:

• @supersonicfest,
• #supersonic
• supersonic festival

I offered up to do some quick analysis, and thought It might be interesting to look at text analysis.

Using the service by IBM, called Many Eye’s, I uploaded the dataset that Pete provided (plain extract and on Many Eye’s) and did some very quick analysis.

A wordle, is a simple map of common words, in this particular example I’ve removed off the ‘common English words’ as well as the keywords identified above.

Supersonic Wordle

For all the above, you can click on the image and interact with them on Many Eye’s.

So, let’s see if we can see any relationships using a ‘phrase net’

Supersonic Phrase Net

I’ve not excluded any words in the above, but we can see that ‘Goblin’ still shows up as a popular word.  With phrase nets, the idea is that you can see the relationships between words.

A better way to drilldown into the patterns, is to use word trees.  In this case below, I’ve focussed on the phrases that include ‘rhubarbradio’, which covered the event (Listen Again on Rhubarb Radio).

Rhubarbradio & Supersonic Word Tree

Finally,  ignore what was actually said.  Data is about patterns, therefore I suppose that the number of tweets including #supersonic exponentially increased over the weekend. This is in the form of a steamgraph, and is drawn directly from the Twitter search engine.

Supersonic Steamgraph

The good thing about the steamgraph is that we can see some key words at the peaks, (if you click the graph you will be able to input your own search and then see the actual tweets that included the keyword)

This was a whistle stop tour of some text/trend analysis tools.  I’d highly recommend having a play on Many Eye’s yourself.  Also take a look at this post on Juice Analytics regarding text analysis.

In the second part of the analysis, I’ll be looking into the date, time and people trends.  So check it out soon.

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