“A stop motion visualisation of my digital media project. Will scan a twitter feed for tweets talking about Windows 7, pick out keywords grouped into 6 major emotions categories and display one of six video (will be 10 seconds) depending on the most popular emotion at that point in time. Video will display emotions acted out by a PC man of Mac vs PC adverts fame – acted out by my dear friend Liam, who will be rotoscoped.”

More professional version – similar to Monitter, includes fade-in effect: http://www.ajaxprojects.com/ajax/tutorialdetails.php?itemid=751#start
(Twitter alert, similar thing: http://blog.corunet.com/twitter-alerts-using-twitter-streaming-api/)

via ajaxprojects.com:
Simple PHP Twitter Search ready to use in your web projects – http://www.moretechtips.net/2009/10/realtime-realted-stream-bar-collecta.html
Super simple way to work with Twitter API (PHP + CSS) – http://woork.blogspot.com/2009/06/super-simple-way-to-work-with-twitter.html
Send messages from a PHP page using Twitter API – http://woork.blogspot.com/2007/10/twitter-send-message-from-php-page.html

Application?

(Not entirely sure caters for project)

Other:

Tutorial on displaying a twitter feed in adobe flex

Book: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2286321/Adobe-Flex-Coding-Guidelines

Advertising in recent decades has enhanced its ability to give us not only a product but now provides intangible values. “Simple ideas, such as computers, have morphed from “technology equipment” into larger, consumer-focused concepts such as “lifestyle entertainment.” […] Intangible assets have become more valuable than tangible assets. Specifically, a consumer’s emotions are tapped into. (Gobé, 2001; xiii)

Logically brands have moved towards our social networks. In brands’ efforts to “come to life for people and forge a deeper, lasting connection” (ibid; xiv) it is logical that they should try to become key in the networks within which we trade and act out emotions. Emotional engagement within brands is key to the modern advertising environment.

Thus there has been a massive “Rise in brands’ use of social media in attempts to infiltrate consumers’ communities and become a centre of online behaviour. The idea of being a “friend of” a brand may have sounded ridiculous in the past but is now a common idea.” (How consumers use social networks [online]) It’s very simple: “What brand wouldn’t want a consumer’s online and offline behaviour to function around elements of their product?” (Palmer, Koenig-Lewis (Online))

Brands now have their own blogs with information from inside the daily life of the company; PR companies beseech bloggers to try their newest product or attend events; and products have become commonplace on Facebook and Twitter. This is hardly ineffective; for example Starbucks operates on Facebook with 5,020,073 (November 2009) and is present on YouTube and Twitter, and Innocent Smoothie has 19,224 followers on social networking site Twitter.

How effective are these efforts? There have been a number of digital projects tapping into the emotions of the web and attempt to organise them by both brands and individuals, mostly evolving around Twitter.

Skittles for example redesigned its main site to display every Tweet written about ‘Skittles’ (although this was abused by users), Mini has launched ‘Positweets’ tracking positive tweets throughout twitter, and projects such as ‘We Feel Fine’ and ‘Twistori’ have attempted to track the feelings of the entire internet in real time using Social Media and Twitter respectively.

In a development from these projects I propose that my practical digital media project will focus around the brand emotion of Microsoft and their Windows 7 operating system. Microsoft launched Windows 7 in October, amidst a large amount of skepticism. The launch focused massively around social networking, and the idea of users hosting their own Windows 7 parties, bringing warm and friendly emotions to the brand. Crucially, what brought most negative and humorous PR from most people was a transparent attempt by the company in their launch video (hosted by social video site Youtube). Smiling actors told users how they had held a Windows 7 party, how great it had been, and offered tips. In an attempt to engage with existing consumer behaviour, they had also tried to ‘brand’ a party and most crucially change behaviour. Rather than solely having a party, the onus was on promoting Microsoft products to their friends. Whilst the educational party video explained that they were not acting as salesmen, the script left many wondering if this was a joke:

“When everyone was there and settled I led an overview of some of my favourite windows 7 features. I showed my guests things from two of the windows 7 orientation videos. And it took like ten minutes. Oh you know what was great? It was totally informal. Like everyone just kind of crowded around the computer in the kitchen.” Windows 7 Party Video [Online]

The video promotes the ideas that windows 7 is “more fun”, “easy and exciting”. I wish to create a Twitter monitor that gauges opinions on the product and displays a video visualization of these emotions (acted out by infamous PC Man of Mac vs PC), updating every ten seconds to display how the Twitterverse feels about the product in real-time.

Videos will not serve to visualise how people rate the product, e.g. ‘rubbish’ but will focus around a suggested six key emotional states; ”disgust, happiness, anger, neutrality, sadness and surprise.” (Gonsalves [Online]) On top of these it will be necessary to include ‘friendliness’ and ‘fanliness’ – how users view the brand. Is it, as many products try to be, a friendly company, and do people list themselves as friends of the brand – or is this more of a Facebook-based phenomenon? The project will look for these key emotions and synonymous emotions, determine the prominent emotional category within the ten seconds, and play appropriate videos. Videos played will be logged so that emotions over time can be analysed. If no emotion is felt, then a video will demonstrate this.

The project will aim to answer:

What key emotions do Windows 7 users feel?
Does Windows 7 engage happy, fun, and excited emotions within users as Microsoft hoped?
Do the predominant emotions of the product change over time?
Do users commonly see the Windows 7 product as a friend?
Do people actually feel any emotion towards Microsoft?
How much do we talk about how brands and products make us feel?

In monitoring Twitter we get real-time emotions, quicker to update that a blogging system, and updatable from anywhere. Choosing Twitter over Facebook will allow tweets to be graphically visualized since they are no longer than 140 characters, whereas Facebook statuses can be lengthier. Updates will be gathered from the Twitter public timeline (http://twitter.com/public_timeline).

I have built upon the idea of a similar visualization measuring keywords Creative and Frustrated, providing a graphic visualization showing which way the ‘twitterverse’ is more inclined at that point in time. In decompiling the application, I found that it is created using Adobe Flex.

Flex can be used to develop cross-platform (for example MXML) based around Adobe Flash, and I will most likely use Adobe’s Flex Compiler for this, since it is freely available. This should be a challenge, since I have limited coding knowledge (HTML and vague Javascript) and will have to learn this. This will allow visual elements and the twitter public feed to interact and display videos as is appropriate. Whilst it would be possible to use AJAX and J-Query to create the system, I am more familiar with Flash and Adobe products and with less of a programming history feel Flex would be most appopriate.

As mentioned, the character of PC man from Apple’s Mac vs PC ads will be used. Rotoscoping videos will allow less identification with the individual playing the character and a more generalised; any actor with an appropriate outfit and haircut/wig can play the part, and in cartoon form the reference should be more recognizable. Whilst it might be tempting to aim to create two visualisations for Apple vs PC, I do not have the time to complete this, and am mostly interest in how Microsoft’s attempts to “do social” are received alongside the product.

As other projects such as Positweets by Mini have done I could create a #hashtag which my application could also search for. In this case it would allow me to create a potential trend of commenting, arrange a way for me to organise tweets and view them through a timeline search.

Videos can be shot on any camera, and rotoscoped in Adobe Flash. In this case I will need to change my fps (frames per second) to 15 rather than 25, and as advised I will use a tablet. My drawing skills will need to get up to scratch; I have had a short practise with Rotoscoping and will need to continue this so that videos are fully recognizable as I intend them to be.

The final result will be in the form of ‘rich’ internet application embedded on a main internet site, for which I will have to find hosting. Any design for the main site will use HTML (primarily Divs), and CSS for overall content styling.

My research is available on blog: http://cft20.wordpress.com which includes case studies of mentioned projects, thoughts and brainstorms as the project has progressed.

Bibliography.

Gobé, 2001, Emotional branding: the new paradigm for connecting brands to people. Allworth Press: New York
How consumers use social networks http://www.eranium.at/blog/upload/consumers_socialmedia.pdf (accessed 08/10/09)

Gonsalves http://www.culture24.org.uk/science+%2526+nature/art73188 (accessed 07/10/09)

Nielsen 2009 http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/nielsen_globalfaces_mar09.pdf (accessed 02/10/09)

Palmer, Koenig-Lewis http://assets.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/ViewContentServlet;jsessionid=1FDCBC79F130407BC91178BA8BBC95AE?contentType=Article&Filename=Published/EmeraldFullTextArticle/Articles/3250030301.html#b58 (accessed 07/10/09)

Universal Maccann http://www.slideshare.net/mickstravellin/universal-mccann-international-social-media-research-wave-3 (accessed 04/10/09)

Windows 7 Online Party Video http://uk.houseparty.com/offers/windows7uk/hosthelpvideos (accessed 20/09/09)

Visitors will be greeted with a typographical image of a couple engaged in a loving pose.

The image consists of hundred of different words that people use when talking about sex in their tweets.

When a user rolls over the word, it reveals the total number of times that it has been tweeted that day.

The site also contains the results of an in-depth survey conducted by PR agency OneVoice, which monitors European couples attitudes towards sex. Source: <a href=http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/theWork/news/920835/Philips-sex-talk-Glue-london/" target="_blank"Campaignlive.co.uk

Nice idea, but quite dull.

2005.
Searches for weblogs for “i am feeling” and “i feel”. Looked at geographical, gender, and age data. Results in a database with 15,000-20,000 new ‘feelings’ a day.

“interface is a self-organising particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. Particles’ properties – colour, shape, size, opacity – indicate characteristics. Particles can be checked to see the full sentence/paragraph.

Displays the results in 6 visual forms.

One works for company that created Philips Sex Talk, a site which monitors and displays tweets describing sex.
Suggests ajax over actionscript as will be more documented.
Pointed towards investigating “J-Query”

Some confusion over CRONS:
[I will require a server than can run CRON jobs; a script that runs every X minutes. CRONs - an automated background setting e.g. used for Twitter to Facebook auto updates. CRONs have a maximum update setting e.g, every 2 minutes.]
Will not be required as will be using real-time updates.

Talked to animator about rotoscoping.
Industry standard animation frame is 16:9, 720×1280 pixels.
For rotoscoping suggests 15 fps (frames per second) instead of regular video 25.
Get a tablet for any rotoscoping or else will go mad.
Suggests a Wacom Bamboo. minimum size of 6x4inches.

For Mini. Measures positivity on twitter. Uses hashtag #positweets.