BackType

Earlier this week, a meme erupted on Twitter based on the #LessAmbitiousMovies hashtag. The premise was to modify a movie title to be “less ambitious”. TechCrunch wrote about the meme as it was happening.

Last night we put our analytics platform to work and looked into exactly what happened. We capture, process and store every message sent on Twitter so it was easy for us to look at all the recent tweets containing #lessambitiousmovie, #lessambitiousfilm, or #lessambitiouscinema.

Here’s what we discovered as of yesterday:

• 364K tweets in the meme from 81K Twitter users
• Each participant tweeted out an average of 4.5 movie titles
• At its peak, there were 17 titles being sent out per second
• Tweets showed up as many as 300M times (our impressions metric) in peoples’ streams
• Up to 27M unique Twitter users were reached (our reach metric)

The first tweet was sent at 10pm PST on January 3rd. 15 hours later things began to take off on Twitter. From there, it took 8 hours for the meme to reach its peak at 8pm PST. The peak occurred shortly after TechCrunch blogged the story and it only died down 27 hours later.

How it all started

The first person to tweet less ambitious movie titles was @Rob_McCallum:

• “Scott Pilgrim vs The Room”

• “The Matress, The Matress Rotated, The Matress Restuffed “
• “Von Ryans Rollerskate”
• “The Thong”

@adwebbow then replied with some movie titles of his own:

• “Around The Town In Eighty Days”
• “Those Magnificent Men On Their Cycling Machines”

@greghemphill69 was key in spreading the meme as he has over 3000 followers. His tweet triggered lots of people to start participating:

The Top 5 #LessAmbitiousFilms

• “Desperately Seeking Slutzanne”

• “Being John Stamos “
• “Forgetting Sarah Palin “
• “T: The Terrestrial”
• “Apocalypse Whenever “

The most popular movie came from @OhFerras mainly because Katy Perry retweeted it, resulting in over 400 retweets and replies. Unsurprisingly, the most popular tweets usually came from people with lots of followers. Whether their celebrity translates to comedic ability is for you to decide.

Conclusion

We hope the insights discussed in this post are interesting to both those who observed and participated in the meme. If you’re interested in more of this kind of analysis, we’re currently accepting a limited number of users into the beta for our analytics product. Contact us here if you would like to be included.

A special thanks to Christopher and Jason (our two new interns who are now on day 4 at BackType) who helped put together the queries and analysis to do this in a few short hours. We had a blast doing this and are always looking for brilliant engineers to help build and scale our forthcoming analytics product. If working on challenges like finding answers in massive data-sets interests you, please visit our technology blog or drop us a line at jobs@backtype.com.

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 7th, 2011 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.