The IT Student Blog

A few weeks back I stumbled upon this blog post by Matt Biddulph, former CTO of Dopplr, where he explains how he used the Github API to find potential people for recruitment. The idea is tantalising! Obviously the results must be interpreted with some sanity but I started wondering if this was something I could apply in another context.

Outside my studies I’m actively involved in Scouting and I recently joined the planning team for a huge event in Sweden in 2011. It is the 22nd World Scout Jamboree and I’m working with some intelligent people on social media and marketing. One of the themes for the Jamboree is Meetings, implying that the Jamboree is a great place to meet new friends, bridge cultures and work towards better understanding. Around 30 000 Scouts from all over the world will be gathered. On a side note, roughly 20% of the participants are from Sweden. Meaning it will be a truly international event which hope to gather Scouts from more than 150 countries. The Olympic games isn’t even close

A part of the social media work is maintaining the @Jamboree2011 Twitter account which, at the time of writing, has 802 followers. Now, it seems to me that some of my twitter friends must also follow @Jamboree2011. Therefore, I postulated the following question: Would it be possible to measure the amount of meetings facilitated by the 22nd World Scout Jamboree? While that is a very broad question, perhaps we can use it to derive indicators for the social media marketing impact, and especially its contribution to the theme Meetings.

One way I thought of brought me back to Matt’s post on social recruitment. Twitter provides a developer API and there’s a handy python library to make it easy to use. Therefore, I started poking around with a small script that builds a graph based on the connections between the followers of a Twitter account. Here’s the first result when analysing @mljungblad:

Essentially, each red dot in the graph above represents one of my followers. Each connection between two red dots means that at least one follows the other, or both ways. Simply counting the number of connections gives us the total amount of meetings facilitated through me. Of course, there is little purpose of doing this for me, but it will generate some cool data on the Jamboree account. Until Twitter changes the rate limit on my account this is what I have to work with though.

Using the raw data we can make many more applications, such as plot the distribution on a world map using the geographical data that some users provide. We could make measurements over time, to see the increase in number of meetings between followers. Hypothetically we could also determine the most or best connected followers and recruit them to our HR department. Once the data is gathered, there’s so much you can do. What would you do?