PerformancePoint Blog

Joy! Free Twitter analytics goodness based on the Microsoft BI platform!

Wesley Backelant fired off an early morning tweet on the newly-released Microsoft Analytics add-in for Twitter, and I gotta say that I’m pretty excited. Twitter is my social media tool of choice, and I’ve been playing around with various .NET twitter-related libraries out on codeplex in an effort to do many of things this add-in does out of the box.

Essentially the add-in is made up of:

• Logic to search twitter for users, keywords, and hashtags.
• A PowerPivot data model to store search results
• A set of Excel worksheets used to report on topics (keywords), people (users), sentiment (tone) and see individual tweets themselves

….and source code. Glorious, beautiful source code. The final worksheet in the add-in contains all the code you need to rebuilt this solution yourself. Bless you Microsoft & Extended Results: I haven’t giggled like a little girl at 6AM in quite a while.

A quick jump start:

First,  download it:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26213

Here’s a Wiki for late-breaking issues with the add-in:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/3296.aspx

After installing the add-in, you’ll want to insert keywords, hashtags, and people into the search window. I, of course, search for myself:

The add-in’s code takes over to do the dirty work with Twitter, and you’ll see:

…and:

You’ll  be prompted to do a manual data refresh both in the PowerPivot environment and  in “Excel proper”, and you’re ready to rock and roll.

Let’s run through the worksheets you can play with step-by-step, shall we?

Tone Dictionary

The Tone Dictionary is a handy “configurator” which lets you define what words should drive positive and negative sentiment on the “Tone” worksheet that we’ll look at later. I rather enjoyed reading some of the negative terms like “terrible”, “sucks” and “worthless”. Well done! All of these terms can be edited:

Topics

The Topics worksheet is your overview data – it includes some basic information like total tweets, retweets, mentions, and more:

There is an excellent array of pre-configured slicers to let you filter by search query, time of day, tone, users, mentions, and hashtags.

I give Microsoft and Extended Results big props for adding some nice time intelligence to this worksheet. I’ve filtered the results below so that you can see when I do the majority of my tweeting – before work, with a little bit of time spent after 5:

On an unsliced workbook you can immediately see that Wesley got a lot of @mentions, while I did a lot of tweeting against the #businessinteligence and #msbi hastags (two of my favorite haunts):

People

On the People worksheet you have the same set of slicers to work with, and the ability to see top tweeters, mentions, retweeters, and mentioners.

You can also spot who is tweeting “positively” and “negatively” based on the tone dictionary:

It looks like Cecillio is having a bad day over on #businessintelligence! Want to know why? Just go over to the Details worksheet and find the tweet in question:

Once I did my filtering, I found that he had just used an unhappy emoticon – he didn’t drop a “sucks”, “worthless”, or “terrible”, which left me a bit disappointed:

#WorkModeOn –>; #BusinessIntelligence de data desde el 2001 al 2011 WTF Cubo y mas Cubo hoy   #SQLServer2008

Tone

Finally, there’s the Tone worksheet – you’ll use it do determine how folks are feeling about people, topics, and anything else:

You can see that something “good” happened on the #businessintelligence hastag on 6/9, and that yours truly has been pretty neutral the last few days.

Wrap up

This is good stuff. It is eminently configurable with the ability to add additional slicers, leverage DAX,  and use calculated measures in PowerPivot. Including source code so you can rip down and rebuild this yourself? Genius! Download, use and love this thing!