Finding Trends in Online Forums

Besides tracking when who is most influential, we can also track when those influencers talk about what products – when is the buzz about a certain product the greatest. Based on standard information retrieval procedures (tfidf) we can compute a concept map of the most significant terms used in the online forum, and the relationships between those terms. Figure 18 displays a concept map for the 50 most significant terms over the entire 4 months period.

Figure 19. Concept map (term view), most significant actors on term “bose” shown

In figure 19, the reader has selected the term “Bose”, showing that “Randy Warren” is the most influential person talking about Bose.

Using the TeCFlow taxonomy feature allows us to identify the most significant messages about the brands we are most interested in. The taxonomy:
<level0>loudspeaker brand
<level1>Bose
<level1>Klipsch
<level1>Denon
<level1>Marantz
<level1>Polk
will categorize documents about the loudspeaker brands Bose, Klipsch, Denon, Marantz, and Polk into 5 clusters. Figure 20 displays the result of clustering the documents into these 5 categories.

Figure 20 Auto-categorization by taxonomy, and most significant document about “Polk”

Figure 20 also show a pop-up window brought up by the user, which lists all the documents about “Polk”, sorted by significance. The most highly-ranked document tells that Chris “would take BA over Polk any day”, an open invitation for Polk to get back to Chris and ask him why he got this unfavorable opinion about their product.

Finally, figure 21 shows us when in time what brand was the hottest. For example, discussion about paradigm speakers peaked around day 40. This means, at this point in time group betweenness centrality was high (the light yellow line), as was betweenness centrality of term “paradigm”. Discussion about Denon, on the other hand, was relatively flat for the first ninety days, but became the dominant issue in days 92 to 120.

Figure 21 Evolution of Betweenness over time of key brands, identifying trends