Cathode Tan - Games, Media and Geek Stuff
logo design by man bytes blog

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Funny Math: Analzying "Social Media Site Posts"

This fascinating post about Cymphony's analysis on consumer favoritism brings up this illuminating detail:

but results of a consumer survey carried out in the US based upon some 18,000 posts on social media sites suggests that a major factor...
-- Consumers favour HD DVD over Blu-ray due to negative perception of Sony

Yup, that's right - the survey was apparently based on forum posts. Forum posts, people. And in case anyone thinks I'm just putting my own slant on it, this is the methodology in the actual report:

Cymfony’s Orchestra platform sifted millions of posts from a broad universe of social media sites (including blogs, discussion boards, consumer review sites, etc) from October 1, 2006—November 23, 2006. The technology identified, compiled, and tagged 17,664 posts for references to HD DVD, Blu-ray and 12 specific models of high definition players. A subset of 2000 posts with substantive discussions of these formats were randomly selected and tagged with more detailed data on the tonality and discussion topics included.


For an example of just how unscientific this is - I could have used the same analysis a year ago to determine that Nintendo would likely be a software only company today. With forum posts, they have no way of smoothing out their demographics or determining any kind decent curve - nor determining just how informed or uninformed the people actually are. Or how many people are posting in multiple places. Or heck, just trolling because they weren't actually taking a survey.

Yeesh.





tagged: ,

No comments: