Inglorious Basterds won at the box office and dominated Twitter conversations this weekend.  In addition to grossing nearly $37 million, Quentin Tarantino’s World War II-themed saga has been afixed to Twitter’s trending topics list since Friday.

Word of mouth referrals are nothing new to the movie business.  But, as Simon Dumenco (@simondumenco) points out in Friday’s AdAge, Twitter brings an element of speed and reach that is entirely new – and, he argues – potentially threatening to Hollywood.  To better understand Twitter content about new releases, Dumenco speculates that “…someday soon, someone’s going to get a PhD in the statistical parsing of Twitter data streams…”

Well, Mr. Dumenco, let us humbly assert that someday is today.  Crimson Hexagon turned its algorithm (created by a Harvard PhD professor) loose on this weekend’s Twitter conversation about Inglorious Basterds.

We performed the PhD magic on a sample of over 4500 Tweets from this weekend and found that:

• 40% of all Tweets on Inglorious praised the film, with an additional 9% hailing it as classic Tarantino
• Anticipation was still high, with almost a quarter of all Twitters talking about the movie still eager to see it
• The critics? Quiet so far, with only 8% of Tweets expressing disappointment at Tarantino or the film
• Finally, 14% want to know others’ opinions about the movie: Glad we could help

Tags: advertising, data, events, measurement by Megan Costello
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Twitter has now become the communication channel of choice for many celebs to make announcements.  The Twitterverse was a buzz yesterday with news of Paula Abdul leaving American Idol.  Of course with the hundrreds of buzz tools out there we could have learned of the spike in Tweets or the general sentiment of the Twitterverse.  But we unleashed our VoxTrot technology to dive into what the real opinions were of the “event”.  Overall, many were sad, even “distraught” to see her go, with 44% of those expressing opinions saying that they were disappointed and some refusing to even watch the show anymore.  The Kirstie Alley announcement and Kara’s role created speculation about new and replacement judges.  And 20% just saw the event as a joke, referring to Paula’s sometimes strange behavior as a highlight of the show.  Even Bill Clinton’s role to free the American journalists was considered as an option to return Paula to Idol.

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Tags: uncategorized by Melyssa
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