May 25, 2010
Ever wondered what good Twitter actually does? Personally,
I love it, but really,
is it anything but noise? One of the pipe dreams for online social
media is the ability to track opinions and interests in real
time.
In their paper Predicting the Future With
Social Media, Sitaram Asur and
Bernardo A.
Huberman have not only tracked live opinion on movies, but used
it to predict their future success. Asur and Huberman, from the
Social Computing
Lab, HP Labs California,
have shown that the rate of
tweeting about a movie accurately predicts its opening weekend box
office revene.
After examining the rate of chatter from almost 3 million movie
tweets, the researchers constructed a linear regression model for
predicting box-office revenues of movies in advance of their
release. These results outperformed the Hollywood Stock Exchange, a market in
which people can buy and sell virtual shares in actors, directors
and individual movies and produces unusually accurate predictions
of film popularity. There is a strong correlation between the
amount of tweets concerning a forthcoming film, and its opening
weekend box office return.
The rate of tweeting about a movie was determined by simply
counting the number of tweets containing the movie name. The next
step was to predict box office returns beyond the opening weekend,
and this was achieved by including "sentiment" as a factor.
Sentiment analysis is a fascinating area of linguistic study.
Language classifiers were used to label the text associated with
the movie tweet as Positive, Negative or
Neutral. Adding these as factors into the regression
significantly increased the researchers' ability to predict the box
office returns beyond the opening weekend. These results are
intuitive - before a movie is released, potential viewers do not
know whether they will like the movie and so simply the number of
tweets about a movie gives an indicator of movie "buzz" and
correlates with the number of people attending the opening weekend.
Once a movie is released and people start forming opinions, movie
tweets start to contain sentiment. Negative tweets, whilst they
have little effect on the opening box office as no one has yet seen
the film, have a strong influence on further returns. Likewise for
positive tweets.
The question of cause and effect is very interesting. Does a
high number of tweets about a movie actually cause a strong box
office return, or are they correlated simply because the twitter
and movie audience are arguably the same? Another way of asking
this question is to ask whether an advertiser could change future
box office returns by deliberately tweeting multiple times or with
a particular sentiment. I had a fascinating chat with Sitaram about
this work.