A Day in the life of Rush Limbaugh on Twitter

Rush Limbaugh's been a pretty hot topic lately, and he's certainly been a popular discussion on Social Media.

In the 24 hours preceding 8pm EDT (which is midnight, GMT), there's been roughly 14,000 tweets that include "limbaugh" in the contents, or about 10 a minute.  Keep in mind that it's a weekend, and Rush hasn't said anything on the air since Friday ...


Sentiment

Some breakdown of the sentiment in those tweets (click on chart to enlarge):

52% of the tweets registered as weakly or strongly negative, while 21% registered as weakly or strongly positive.  That's no surprise.  No matter who's talking about Rush or their position, they're probably not happy about what's going on. See the comments at the end about limits of sentiment analysis.


Hash Tags

One thing that is always interesting is the use of hash tags (#winning).  These are unstructured and uncontrolled, and so it is purely convention that is adopted by Twitter users.  For the posts that talk about Rush, the following are the top twenty hashtags:

HashTag	Count	Percent
#p2	824	9%
#limbaugh	585	6%
#stoprush	583	6%
#tcot	544	6%
#boycottrush	536	6%
#gop	262	3%
#taxpayerfunded	245	3%
#flushrush	232	3%
#rush	194	2%
#snl	186	2%
#waronwomen	182	2%
#gamechange	158	2%
#cnn	147	2%
#fem2	126	1%
#tlot	109	1%
#topprog	107	1%
#ows	102	1%
#rushlimbaugh	94	1%
#teaparty	93	1%
#news	82	1%

#p2 is the has tag for "Progressives on Twitter".  I was surprised to see it as the most popular tag.  #tcot is "Top Conservatives on Twitter". #fem2 is for feminists. #tlot is "Top Libertarians on Twitter".  What's interesting is that there is no hashtag which is reaching critical mass.  If you were to search for just #stoprush, for example, you would get only a tiny fraction of the posts about Limbaugh.

Twitter Users

There are no clear "top posters"; the most frequent poster is "Miaminonymous", who appears to just retweet everything, with 131 posts.

The top 25 people mentioned in tweets are:

User ID	count	% of Mentions
@thinkprogress	480	4.0%
@hipstermermaid	320	2.7%
@limbaugh	310	2.6%
@huffingtonpost	191	1.6%
@credomobile	182	1.5%
@politico	167	1.4%
@addthis	158	1.3%
@shoq	153	1.3%
@superguts	152	1.3%
@denisleary	152	1.3%
@billmaher	133	1.1%
@youtube	131	1.1%
@politicususa	121	1.0%
@tmorello	118	1.0%
@theblaze	117	1.0%
@cdibona	114	1.0%
@mediaite	112	0.9%
@anonyops	112	0.9%
@sandrafluke	102	0.9%
@thedailybeast	95	0.8%
@rushlimbaugh	92	0.8%
@krystalball1	80	0.7%
@boingboing	76	0.6%
@stoprush	70	0.6%
@thedailyedge	70	0.6%

Interestingly, @limbaugh is not the twitter account Rush uses, @rushlimbaugh is.  


Comments

What I make of this

Rush Limbaugh is still a hot topic in social media.  I would expect that tomorrow, Monday, if there is significant news related to Rush (more advertisers pull out or he says something controversial) we will see a spike in topics.  On the other hand, if something else rises to the top of the news cycle, we may see Rush take a breather on Twitter.  It is interesting that the conversation is still scattered -- huge numbers of disconnected users and hash tags.   There is not one conversation taking place; there are thousands.

Limits on Sentiment Analysis


Sentiment analysis is a mechanical assessment of the sentiment, positive or negative, in a tweet.  It does not necessarily indicate approval (if positive) or disapproval (if negative) of a particular subject.  Consider some contrived examples: "I hate the constant criticism of Rush" is negative, while "I am so happy that Rush is losing advertisers.  I love the ones who are quitting" is very positive.  The sentiment generally tells us whether the statement is happy and upbeat or negative and downbeat.  In large numbers, it is a crude assessment of a topic like I am using it in this post.

Rush Fire

It is tempting to look at the recent dust up around Rush Limbaugh’s insulting name-calling of a law school student as merely another instance in a right vs. left battle in this country. Many times, commentators will mention that people on the left are equally capable of inflammatory comments as they go on to skewer Rush.  Some on the right, sensing it is a partisan issue, have defended Rush, even some women.

Although I have a strong opinion on the subject from both a political as well as a propriety view, there's something that a lot of people are missing about this incident: the rising political power of social media and, just as importantly, the dominating use of social media by women.

In a nut shell, Rush used fighting words against a woman, and women are fighting back and winning.

Proflowers Facebook page

~6K Likes, ~8K comments

And the tools they are using are social media.  But, strangely, the traditional media is blind to that.  Take the first article I linked to in this blog post, from "The Week".  Where does it mention the intense conversation taking place on Facebook? The websites devoted to tracking the advertisers to Rush's show and barraging them with demands to stop advertising?  Nowhere.  If you were to just read the article, you would think that the advertisers acted out of moral indignity, not in response to pressure from the (female) public.

Nearly 300,000 people Liked Planned Parenthood,

about a third of those who like Rush.  You might be

tempted to think the Social Media audience is male

and conservative.  That is a dangerous assumption.

But let's look at the ways social media worked to rally a response to Rush Limbaugh.  First is the obvious channel of Facebook.  There are all sorts of friend to friend sharing of outrage, although it's hard for anyone to see much of that given the general privacy settings on Facebook.  But we can see some of the effects nonetheless.

Rush is getting a lot of traffic on his Facebook page, pro and con:

Nearly 20k comments on Rush's Page

And there's a whole bunch of Boycott Rush groups on Facebook, including this one:

This is pushing people to write to advertisers, asking them to drop support for Rush's show.  For example, take a look at Lifelock's page on Facebook:

And 2000 more on another post

You might say this is a tempest in a Facebook teapot, but have a look at what's going on out on the Internet. One example is "boycottrush.org"which redirects to "leftaction.com".  Let's look at its traffic (courtesy of Alexa):

It has gone from being nothing to being somewhere around the 14,000th most visited site on the web.  That seems insignificant until you drill down and discover that about 1.5 million visitors have stopped by this page since the start of the Rush fire. (see footnotes)  This is a lot of visitors.

And these visitors are mostly female and aged 45 and up.  These are not the people most associate with savvy internet users, but that assumption is clearly wrong (as an aside, these are the people who tend to vote).  Perhaps not too surprisingly, many of these are women who are veterans of the women's liberation movement.  They obviously haven't lost their fervor, and they're taking it online.

This group is well organized, maintaining a web-collaboration based spreadsheet in of advertisers (former and current) with contact information which they are keeping current with every show:

And Rush has been a popular topic on Twitter all of a sudden, to no surprise:

Sadly, there is no sentiment tracking that would help us differentiate the pro-rush vs. anti-rush tweets.  But given the other activity on the internet, it's safe assumption that a lot of it is anti.

I also find it amusing that there seems to be a bit of a gender divide in the analysis of what's going on. My observation is that male reporters seem more blind to the social media power that is being brought to bear and are quicker to focus on the partisan or free-speech aspects of the situation rather than the misogyny that women respond to.  It would appear that if it's not your ox that's being gored it's easier to be dispassionate.

Coming on the heels of the Susan G. Komen situation, it's clear that women are starting to find that they have a real power they can exercise through social media.  (For us men, it would be best if we pay attention to it!)

You might think that this topic is far afield from the core of enterprise technology, but keep this in mind.  Rush Limbaugh is not just a man, but a very large business undertaking.  It is easy to say it's just him, but the problems that cropped up have affected his business and his scores of partners.  Any business which is  in the public eye can have a problem like this.

Rush himself seems to have gone days before he noticed the firestorm he started, and as a result made a situation much worse before he issued his apology.  Had he been more aware, and apologized sooner, it would have better diffused the situation.  It seems to me that a company (and Rush is a company) that notices a mistake quickly and reacts to it looks much better than one that lets things drag on.  The former seems like a company that cares, while the latter seems only like a company that didn't realize it had been caught until too late.

The advertisers have adopted a different strategy, which is to lay low mostly.  Regardless of whether they stay or go, their communications tend to be as succinct and under the radar as possible.  Everyone knows the risks of offending one side or the other, and many seem intent on saying as little as possible, probably hoping it will all blow over eventually.  Whether you can hide in this era of social media is an open question; perhaps for the partners they can, but certainly Rush cannot.

In the end, neither Rush nor most of his advertisers were attune to the signals that were coming from the social media. Your CEO may not call a college student a slut in front of millions of people, but it's just as easy to unwittingly commit some other faux pas that triggers a massive response.  And if you are an advertiser, you have to contend with the perception that your advertising is an endorsement of the person you are sponsoring; now you have to worry about partner reputations as well.

To be fair, most uninvolved people (read: men) didn't pay a whole lot of attention to social media initially.  But the situation shows that businesses cannot afford to turn a deaf ear to the voices being raised on the internet. The only questions left now are how to listen and how to respond.


Footnotes:

Estimate of 1.5 million visitors to leftaction.com:

http://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm estimates total internet population at 2.3 billion users 

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/leftaction.com# estimates daily traffic since the start of the Rush fire on average of .014% of the total internet population.  This also gives demographics of the visitors. 

That works out to about 300K daily visitors, or 1.5 million for the 5 days of the Rush fire tracked by Alexa at the time of this writing.

Windows 8 First Impressions

I've downloaded the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, and have some initial thoughts to share about Win 8 and the new Metro interface. I'll start by saying why it's hard for me, or any one really, to do a decent job of a review, and why we should all be skeptical of any review at this point.  Then I'll move on to trying to ignore my own advice in the previous sentence...

So let's start ...

When you look at a piece of software, you have to envision living with it.  You want to do your work, play your games, surf the net, whatever it is you do with a computer.  And when you have a new, and incomplete, version of software, you can't do that for real.  And so you guess. At least I do.  And odds are I'll guess wrong.  Worse, we all have our biases.  In my case, I was a loyal windows users right up to Windows XP.  After that, we started to switch to Macs at our house.  The last version of Windows we bought was Vista, which was a disaster.  After that, we pretty much are all Mac.

I still use Windows on a daily basis, but it has been demoted to a virtual machine to be summoned for running windows only software.  So, as you can see, I'm not your best windows fanboy to review Metro and Windows 8.

Still, I was excited enough by what I saw to download and install it -- so I'm willing to let it win me over.

So let's have a look at Windows 8...

The key thing about Windows 8 is the Metro UI, as you see it in the first screen shot.  The idea is to move to a more tablet like experience.  And the Metro UI does that, with its large square, easy to hit with a finger icons.  Of course, only a subset of the apps are there, but a right mouse click brings up an icon to see all your applications:

Which leads to:

Not quite the old start menu, but not really far from it.

Metro Apps like to run full screen:

Which is very tablet like.

But you can still run traditional windows (small w) applications as well

Interestingly, the windows desktop is, in some sense, a full screen Metro application.  It is treated like that.  So we you go to switch tasks, the desktop appears as a whole:

Except when you alt-tab, then the desktop programs are distinct:

Looking at it from the viewpoint of a desktop system, there's a couple of things that are interesting.  Both Apple and Microsoft seem enamored of the full screen application.  It's taken from the tablet paradigm for sure.  And, I suppose if you have a smallish laptop display, full screen is useful in situations.

What's amusing (or alarming, you pick) is that this move to an app at a time goes against the entire development history of Microsoft.  MS/DOS was, of course, an app at a time full-screen operating system!  And yet very quickly, as memory capacity grew on PCs, people started trying to find ways to multi-task.  At first there were a variety of add-on multi-taskers to MS/DOS.  Eventually, Microsoft Windows came out, although the first versions were not that good at multi-tasking.

Then, as multi-tasking became more reliable, the holy grail for Microsoft was desktop integration.  You probably don't remember a time when you couldn't copy from Excel and past into Word, but trust me, that was a big deal when it happened.  The idea that you could have a spreadsheet and word processor running at the same time and seamlessly move data back and forth was amazing.  You may want to think that Microsoft's monopolistic tendencies crushed its office competitors like Lotus and Wordperfect, but it was that little trick of integration that made Office dominant.

With Metro, we're not really throwing that away, but it feels like it.  Think about how you would insert a small table you built in Excel into a PowerPoint presentation: you would have two windows open, PowerPoint and Excel.  You'd select the table in Excel, copy it, click on the PowerPoint window, and past.  You do that sort of thing all the time without thinking about it.

But with Metro, assuming you had a Metro Word and Metro Powerpoint, the navigation between applications is more disjoint.  You have to either execute weird mouse moves or alt-tab to get between the applications.  It won't seem smooth.

But, you might ask, what if you aren't really running multiple applications at once? What if you are just logged into Facebook and whiling away the hours?  Well, I admit, Metro is probably great for that.

And that leads to my observation: Metro -- like iOS to be fair -- is designed for the consumption of content, not the creation.  It's like there's two worlds of Windows 8: The creation side (traditional windowing usage) and the consumption side (Metro).  That is a strange dichotomy.

To me, it feels like Microsoft glued two operation systems together -- Windows 8 desktop and Metro tablet, and decided to call it a single operating system.  This is very Microsoft like; when Windows 3.x came out, you had to start MS/DOS and then boot Windows, but you always knew that you had an MS/DOS world (to run your legacy DOS applications) and a Windows world.  It's the same thing, just twenty years later: You have a legacy Windows world and a new Metro world.

If you compare this to how Apple is approaching the integration of iOS and OSX (no longer Mac OSX as of Mountain Lion), there is no separate world of "OSX" apps and "iOS" apps on the desktop.  You can launch and manage the same applications in both the traditional way as well as via the new iOS-like ways.  You can run the same applications in a windowed mode, or in full screen.  The power is in the hands of the user; the transition is up to the user to make or not make at his or her own speed.

I had hoped to find Metro and Windows to my liking.  I had hoped to find something new and useful and a real advance of the desktop paradigm.  I had hoped to find a reason to want to bring Windows back into my daily life beyond just for a few Windows only applications.  But what I find is a forced, awkward, and disconnected experience.  Here's hoping that it improves -- a lot -- by GA.

Real numbers for smart phones

I read a lot about mobile platforms, and there seems to be a constant battle for bragging rights between the iOS and Android platforms.   There's a lot of talk about how activation rates for Android phones are so much higher than for iOS, and therefore that iOS devices have a relatively smaller market share.

The follow on argument from the Apple boosters is that, well, Apple is smaller but they have all the profits.

But is Apple really the smaller vendor?  I was browsing through a report from the Pew Research center (see the report here), and it said that of smart phone users surveyed:

• 20% of cell owners now describe their phone as an Android device, up from 15% in May 2011
• 19% of cell owners now describe their phone as an iPhone, up from 10% in May 2011
• 6% of cell owners now describe the phone as a Blackberry, down from 10% in May 2011

Statistically, then, Android and iOS are tied. (Note that 45% of all cell phone owners say they own a smartphone, so there's nobody missing from those percentages).

What's even more interesting is that Android users are up 5% in about a year, but iPhone users are up 9%.  That seems terribly at odds with the conventional wisdom about adoption (like at business insider).

I have a couple of thoughts on the subject:

• iOS has a good head start
• Apple has a stronger support for keeping 1 and 2 generation old devices up to date with software.  If you have a 3GS, you are still able to get iOS 5.  Android, on the other hand, tends to orphan devices fairly quickly.  So people may stay on an iOS device longer than people on Android devices, resulting in a longer in-service life for iPhones.
• Similarly, the fact that a few years old iPhone is still able to run current software means that it has value in the used market.  An old and out of date Android device is not going to look attractive compared to getting a new one from the carrier.
• How many people get an Android and switch to iPhone later?

Because of these, I suspect there's a lot of retired yet fairly modern Android phones out there.  And that's why a random survey of what people actually use shows the iPhone still holding even with Android.