With the growing relevance of social media and interactions that happen within its ethos, Microsoft wanted to create a bleeding edge, impactful, socially relevant obelisk that would help senior executive level attendees, who may have varying experience with social media (from zero experience or understanding to expert), realize how massive the community and conversation were.
This visual experience should create a high energy yet light hearted environment that engages the audience even from a distance. At the same time, the visualization had to convey a cohesive story which could be understood well by all the participants of the conference. The TV was 2 screens high and 6 screens wide.
To build the dashboard, pull tweets from www.twitter.com/wpc, www.twitter.com/msparter, #WPC14, #msPartner and #new2wpc
The visual could include following data points:
To maintain a sense of continuity and real time activity, the visualization would need to refresh automatically (without page refresh) every 30 seconds
In order to actually build and manage the Conference Dashboard, we ended up creating an enterprise caliber data ingestion engine for fetching, cleaning, modeling and analyzing raw data.
Tweets from the events
Rumi allowed us to query Twitter API for multiple hashtags and handles and model the data every 1 minute. It also allowed us to make multiple elements of the visualisation configurable so the Microsoft team could keep the dashboard relevant as the conference progressed. Finally, Rumi was able to scale up and handle unexpected spikes in the number of tweets.